Students across India have spent the past few weeks building tools to catch the scams that artificial intelligence (AI) is making harder to spot, from cloned voices on phone calls to doctored faces on video KYC. Amazon India, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs have now named the five winning teams of RAKSHAM, a national AI cybersecurity hackathon built around exactly these threats.
The organisers said the challenge drew nearly 5,000 student submissions from 14 states. An online submission round and two rounds of jury evaluation, held over two days, narrowed the field to 30 finalist teams, from which the five winners were picked. Cash prizes range from ₹25,000 to ₹2 lakh, and the top five teams will get a chance to present their solutions to senior Amazon leaders and representatives from government, industry and academia in New Delhi on 10 December.
Problems straight from the cybercrime desk
Rather than open-ended themes, participants were handed problem areas that police and banks are already grappling with:
- Voice cloning: spotting synthetic audio used to impersonate relatives, officials or company executives.
- Fraud detection: flagging suspicious transactions and patterns before money leaves an account.
- AI-driven scam interception: recognising scam scripts and patterns early enough to stop harm.
- Deepfake detection: telling genuine images and videos apart from manipulated ones.
Teams were also asked to go beyond demos and design solutions that could be tested in authorised environments, work reliably and scale responsibly while respecting user privacy.
A campus-led model
Amazon conceptualised the challenge, while IIT Delhi’s student technical clubs, ARIES and Dev Club, ran it together with the institute’s Office of Academic Outreach and New Initiatives. A jury drawn from I4C, Amazon and EasySocial evaluated the finalists.
Amit Gupta, Second-in-Command (NCR & IC) at I4C, said that as AI makes digital services easier to access, it is also giving criminals new ways to exploit citizens through deepfakes, voice cloning and more sophisticated scams. He said I4C wants to spot threats early and prevent harm, and urged participants to take their ideas beyond the prototype stage.
Prof. Pradyumna S., Dean of Student Affairs at IIT Delhi, said that when voices, images and videos can be convincingly manipulated, telling real content from fake is no longer simple, and the hackathon let students apply their technical skills to a problem with real social impact. Rakesh Bakshi of Amazon described RAKSHAM as an example of industry, academia and government working together to help young innovators tackle real-world challenges.
Why it matters for higher education
The initiative builds on Amazon and I4C’s existing work on online safety and scam awareness. For engineering campuses, it points to a useful template. Live problem statements from a national cybercrime agency give students a reason to build security tools that work in the real world, not just for a grade. With AI-enabled fraud rising alongside India’s digital public services, hands-on challenges like this could become an important way to build cybersecurity talent before graduates reach the job market.
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