forwarded. without thinking.

Living in India. WhatsApp has become our most used app on our phones.

And with that. So has the concept of forwards being forwarded.

That’s todays topic too.

Before we dive in, quick poll:

Context:

On May 7, 2025, Ifrah Khalil Kawa, 23, was with her friends at Delhi's Jamia Millia University when she saw news claiming a Pakistani attack on her hometown, Sopore, in Kashmir.

She panicked and tried calling her mom but the network was congested.
Her mother called back.
"Beta, we're fine. Nothing happened here."

The attack never happened, and it was completely fabricated.

The same day from Karachi, a video surfaced titled: "Port destroyed by Indian Navy."
Turns out, the footage was from a plane crash in Philadelphia back in January 2025, and in reality the port was “fully operational”.

Between May 7-10, as India and Pakistan exchanged strikes, a parallel war unfolded on WhatsApp. "Karachi destroyed" got 2 million views. 

Even major TV channels fell for it.

Ramkishan, a 55-year-old farmer from Haryana, got a message during the crisis about an "Important Security Update: Foreign hackers may target your phone." along with a breach warning and a link to verify his device.

Ramkishan clicked the link and entered his Aadhaar and bank details.

"I thought I was doing my duty to protect the country."
By nightfall, his account was emptied.

"I felt stupid, but mostly I was afraid. What else could they do if they could steal my money?"
And "I feel like I'm being watched now."

So Ramkishan now keeps his smartphone turned off most days. 

The May crisis ended and lives went back to normal.
But I kept thinking about Ifrah panicking for two hours and Ramkishan losing everything.

Then last week, I was at Azadpur Mandi with a friend buying vegetables.

I watched him spend 15 minutes checking with three vendors to compare and negotiate potato prices. Just to save ₹40.

The same evening, he forwarded a message in the friends’ group: "URGENT: ₹2000 note ban from tomorrow. Banks closed. Deposit immediately."

All 23 members saw it, and at least 10 of them forwarded it immediately…

I called him and asked if he’d verified it.

"It came from Mr. Sharma, and he's always well-informed."

So the same friend spent 15 minutes haggling over potato prices but not a single minute verifying a news headline that could potentially cost people thousands of rupees.

I couldn't stop thinking about this.

What made him so careful with vegetables but so careless with information?

We've built verification habits for physical things.

We like to haggle at the market, cautiously check the expiry dates and compare prices across shops.

But why don’t we do the same thing with information?

Since then, I started tracking my WhatsApp groups to see if I was right.

The common pattern I noticed was that no one ever dared to ask questions, or cross verify information.

If it’s not relevant to themselves, most people just ignore it.
For those that it’s relevant but it’s come from a “reliable” source like a trusted friend or family member, they just take their word for it.

I started digging into why this happens.
Why do smart people forward stupid things without a second thought?

The research has a name for it and it is called in-group trust bias.

Psychologist Henri Tajfel discovered this in the 1970s: we automatically trust people in our "group" like family, community, caste, religion more than outsiders, even when outsiders have better information.

The closer the relationship, the less we verify.

In India, this gets amplified:

In India, we don't question family. 

We don't fact-check elders, or say "Uncle, that forward is fake" without feeling like we're being disrespectful.

Western countries had decades to build digital literacy because of the rampant email scams in the 90s, phishing warnings in the 2000s, and the fake news discourse since 2016.

In India, 200 million people went from zero internet to WhatsApp in 18 months during Jio's 4G rollout.

And it’s costing us.

India lost ₹22,845 crores to cyber fraud in 2024.
That's a 206% jump from ₹7,465 crores in 2023. 

3x in 12 months.

And we were projected to lose ₹1.2 lakh crores to cyber frauds in 2025.

That's 0.7% of India's GDP going into scammer accounts in Cambodia, Myanmar, and China.

Stock trading scams stood at ₹4,636 crores.
Investment frauds are at ₹3,216 crores.
"Digital arrest" scams worth ₹1,616 crores.

And almost every single fraud starts the same way, i.e, through a WhatsApp forward. 

The Cyber Crime Centre blocked 83,668 WhatsApp accounts, and that's just what they caught. Estimates suggest 10x more operate undetected.

This affects all individuals, small businesses and supply chains are disrupted, and the digital economy starts taking hits.

And we all know someone who's lost money this way.

So I have started doing a few things before forwarding anything, and what you should do too:

I also taught my friend how to do the reverse image search last week.
He figured a "Modi announces new scheme at DAVOS" forward was from 2021.
So he pointed it out in the group and stopped everyone from forwarding it.

Next time, if someone forwards some unverified news, send them this newsletter.
And let me know, what's the last fake forward that fooled you, and how did you find out the truth?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh