Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), Ministry of Home Affairs, and Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen collaboration in combating cyber?enabled financial frauds and curtailing mule accounts across the banking and digital payments ecosystem. The agreement is intended to facilitate cooperation in fraud?risk intelligence sharing, analytical support and operational coordination to reinforce proactive fraud detection and prevention mechanisms. The partnership is described as a step towards integrating institutional capabilities to address increasingly sophisticated digital threats.

The Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation, Shri Amit Shah, posted on X that the government is working to make the country cyber secure and that mule accounts present significant hurdles to curbing cybercrime. He said the MoU will allow data from I4C's Suspect Registry to be fed into AI driven fraud detection systems and that this integration should help detect and remove hidden mule accounts more swiftly. The announcement framed the move as strengthening protections for citizens using digital banking services.

The MoU was signed by Smt Roopa M, IG (Admin), I4C, and Shri Sahil Kinni, CEO, RBIH, in the presence of senior officials including the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and senior officers from the Ministry of Home Affairs and I4C. The ceremony underscored inter?agency coordination and the intent to operationalise the protocols required for secure data exchange and model training. Institutional collaboration is expected to accelerate deployment of enhanced detection tools across regulated entities.

Under the agreement, I4C will share mule account related intelligence and suspect identifiers from its Suspect Registry with RBIH for use in training and enhancing AI driven fraud?risk assessment models, including MuleHunter.ai. RBIH will utilise the datasets to refine detection frameworks implemented across banks and payment platforms and to support resilience of the digital payments ecosystem. The I4C will continue to operate reporting and intelligence platforms such as the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal and the Suspect Registry as part of a broader response architecture to protect citizens and strengthen trust in digital financial services.