Sebi Uses AI To Track 20,000 Fraudulent Social Media Posts Since Nov 2025
Aug 9, 2026
Sebi also deploys R(AI)DAR, an AI-enabled system that reviews advertisements issued by market participants and helps identify potentially misleading or unauthorised promotional content
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify misleading and fraudulent financial content online as the regulator steps up its surveillance of unregistered financial influencers, or finfluencers.
Since its launch in November 2025, Sebi’s Project SUDARSAN has identified more than 20,000 instances of potentially fraudulent content and posts across social media platforms, according to the regulator’s Annual Report 2025-26.
Project SUDARSAN, or Surveillance of Unauthorized Digital Activity via Real-time Scanner for Anti-fraud, is designed to continuously monitor publicly available content across social media platforms.
The AI-powered platform forms part of Sebi’s broader technology-led approach to market surveillance. Sebi Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey said the growing influence of financial influencers has made digital monitoring increasingly important.
How Project SUDARSAN Works
Project SUDARSAN uses multimodal AI to analyse different forms of content, including spoken language, images, videos and text. The system can also assess contextual intent and process content in regional languages.
Sebi said the platform combines these signals with behavioural and regulatory parameters to assign risk scores to potentially suspicious content. It then generates structured alerts for review by the regulator.
The system is designed to identify practices such as claims of guaranteed returns, fraudulent certifications, impersonation of regulated entities and investment advice being offered without the required registration.
The technology marks a shift from manual and reactive surveillance towards automated, real-time monitoring, allowing Sebi to scan a significantly larger volume of social media content than would be possible through conventional oversight.
Sebi has also deployed R(AI)DAR, an AI-enabled system that reviews advertisements issued by market participants and helps identify potentially misleading or unauthorised promotional content.
Finfluencer Influence
The need for such surveillance has grown alongside the increasing influence of financial content creators on investment decisions.
Sebi’s Investor Survey 2025 found that 62 per cent of investors make some investment decisions based on recommendations from finfluencers. The survey also found that 93 per cent of respondents considered financial influencers to be moderately to highly credible.
YouTube was the most-used social media platform for information on securities-market products, cited by 91 per cent of respondents, followed by Instagram at 64 per cent and Facebook at 61 per cent.
The challenge for Sebi, therefore, is not only the volume of financial content available online, but also the extent to which investors trust and act on such information.
“Sebi has responded to this shift by investing in technology and data analytics as core supervisory tools, ensuring that while the market scales, the safety net for the investor scales even faster,” Pandey said.
The regulator is also using measures such as validated Unified Payments Interface (UPI) handles, Sebi Check and verified app labels to help investors distinguish legitimate intermediaries from fraudulent operators.
As investment advice increasingly moves to social media platforms, Sebi’s use of AI signals a broader shift towards technology-driven enforcement, alongside investor education and traditional supervisory mechanisms.
[Business World]
