Daybreak - Your kids might be looting your bank account in the guise of gaming

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Kids all over India are spending real money inside mobile games. And most of the time, they slip by the notice of the adults, until the bill or bank alert eventually arrives. Most of them are using their grandparent's or some other relative's phone, where UPI pins are usually already saved, and they're not watching so closely. In fact, Delihi's cybercrime cell has seen a rise in "fraud" complaints that turn out to be a child spending small amounts repeatedly on loot boxes and in-game stores. India's gaming law banned real-money games because but loot boxes slipped through, because it doesn't immediately count as gambling. But loot boxes don't have set items. You could spend Rs. 75 to open a box with a skin that's worth thousands, and it can even be resold for real cash. So, is it gambling, or not?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

If you've ever left a kid unsupervised with your phone before, you might want to think again. We all know that one kid who's always looking for a phone to play on. For me, it's my 12-year-old cousin who lives with my grandparents. Whenever I visit, he always asks me for my phone, but he's usually always disappointed because I never have any games worth playing on it. And so he always heads straight to my grandfather's phone, which is just the default call-in text apps and then sub-based. Surfers, Fruit Ninja and whatever else game my cousin has installed.

Now, this is probably a familiar phenomenon for most of us. But turns out, kids co-opting their grandparents or any other relative's phone isn't just the usual household story. It's becoming an actual problem. As my colleague, Saakshi Sadashiv found out from two senior Delhi police officials, the city's cybercrime cell has been getting more and more fraud government. But most of them turn out not to be fraud at all. Just a child with the relative's phone and a UPI pin that wasn't kept secret enough from them.

In fact, another game playing 12-year-old that Saakshi spoke to could recite his grandmother's pin from memory. It's the problem prevalent enough that the Hyderabad police has actually issued several advisories on it. And despite last year's government ban on online real money games, Indian regulation hasn't quite caught up with this particular side of the issue. To find out why, I'm reading Sarkshi's edition from one of the Ken's most popular subscriber-only newsletter called Trade Tricks. It is titled, Your Kids Might Be Looting Your Bank Account in the guise of gaming.

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Treacher Vicky's, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikashramana, will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 15th of September. Arush, name changed, my neighbour's 12-year-old, doesn't own a phone or even a credit card. He has two working parents, doting grandparents, and an abiding love for mobile games. His parents' phones are mostly off-limits. His grandparents' phones home are not. That's how he plays Free Fire Max, BGMI or Battlegrounds Mobile India,

Call of Duty Mobile, e-football, Clash Royal, you name it, he has probably played it. The games range from battle royals and football simulations to shooters and strategy games, each with its own in-game economies designed to keep players spending. And his favorite part across these games? Loot boxes. They're also called Lucky Jets and they are in-game mystery boxes that let players spend real or virtual currency for a chance at outfits, skins, weapons and other virtual rewards. He told me that loot boxes are a big deal and that he gets a little rush when he opens one,

comparing it to something like a Pokemon card. So I asked him the obvious question. How do you pay for all this? Arash told me that he knows his nani or grandmother's UPI pin and even parroted it back to me. This, it turns out, is not especially unusual. Last year, the government banned online real money games or ORMGs under the promotion and regulation of online gaming act or Proga, affecting games that involved monetary stakes such as fantasy leagues, poker, rummy and the like. But two senior Delhi police officials told again that the city's cybercrime cell has been seeing a rise in complaints of online fraud even after the legislation. was passed. But when officers investigated, many of these cases didn't actually involve a scammer.

The fraud often turned out to be a child-making in-game purchases with a family member's bank account, card or UPI without naturally bothering to ask. Hyderabad Police too has issued multiple advisories on the subject, pointing to grandparents' phones as a particular weak spot. Payment credentials and UPI apps are around. already set up while the person holding the phone may not be watching quite as closely. A senior Delhi police official told me that teenage boys these days organize their conversations and leisure time around games and peer status is attached to expensive skins, elite past years and rare items bought inside these games.

The skins in the game become both a status symbol and a kind of digital peacocking. Now, the in-game spending starts rather low. Arush is quick to clarify that he only makes small transactions, usually 200 to 500 rupees at a time. A Delhi-based gaming company executive explained that games have perfected a spending ladder where the first step is deliberately tiny. Once you're inside though, there's always another skin, another spin, another crate, and another limited time reward.

In BGMI, for example, you can enter the economy for as less as 15 rupees. You see, the game's virtual currency buys you outfits, skins, royale passes that allow special missions, spins and crates. The authorized voucher store goes from 15 rupees all the way to 7,500 rupees. Shopping on Free Fire Max also starts very low at 9 rupees and goes up to 12,800. Call of Duty Mobile also starts at $99 but goes all the way to almost $50,000. Now, the point isn't that a queen has $50,000 sitting around to blow on call of duty points. It's that $15 doesn't really sound like spending, but neither does the $30,75 or $99 after that.

Though the amount starts small, it's a large part of India's gaming economy. Free FireMax and BGMI together account for roughly 43% of India's in-app game spending. For Free FireMax alone, 25% of its lifetime downloads come from India. Last year's gaming crackdown was designed to target real money games, platforms where players put money or something of monetary value at stake in the expectation of winning more money or another valuable return. It did not, however, settle the question of where loot boxes fit into ordinary video games.

Because the trick here is that you're spending on the thrill of maybe getting something. The executive mentioned earlier said that you are not necessarily paying $75 for a particular item. You are paying $75 for a chance at an item. Maybe you get the rare skin. Maybe you get something nobody wants. Maybe you try again. And that distinction is precisely where the regulatory headache begins. The new gaming law uses a broad definition of other stakes.

That includes credits, tokens and objects by whatever name called. That still leaves some uncertainty around in-app purchases, microtransactions and loot boxes, particularly when the object you win can acquire value outside the game. So games such as Free Fire Max and BGMI can continue to sell virtual goods. The awkward bit is what happens when those virtual goods, stop being quite so virtual. Paying 75 rupees and buying a skin to make a gaming avtar look cool is one thing. But what if the random skin can also be traded with someone else who is willing to pay real

money for it? Well, of course, there is an entire economy outside the game where people are doing exactly that. Third party marketplaces such as Skin Baron, BitSkins, CS money and D-market, let players trade or sell skins for real money through payment methods including PayPal and cryptocurrency. The sums can be rather startling. Rare skins have sold for thousands of dollars

with listings on skin barren reaching over $170,000. At some point, the virtual economy starts looking suspiciously like an actual economy. The Real Money Gaming or RMG ban also appears to have produced a rather strange afterlife for gambling. A Consumer Unity and Trust Society International Survey of 1,000 former RMG users in Delhi found that offshore betting platform usage rose from 68.3% before the ban to 82% after it, while daily use jumped from 3.4% to 42.3%.

Regulators globally are wrestling with this too. Games around the world use in-app purchases as a legitimate way to make money. But loot boxes and tradable skins have become one of the most contentious parts of that business. The European Commission has also examined these in-game purchasing practices through the lens of consumer protection, particularly when games are marketed to children. India, meanwhile, has largely settled the easier question. Ban games where the money itself is the stake. Meanwhile, the harder question remains.

What happens when the bet, if you can call it that, is stuck to. inside an otherwise perfectly legal game. Meanwhile, Arish's 75-year-old Nani, who is not exactly fluent in the nuances of digital payments, is also the kind of user that the RBI has been worried about. In April, the Reserve Bank of India proposed additional safeguards for people aged 70 and above, including a trusted person authentication layer for certain one-time transactions above $50,000. It also proposed a one-hour delay for some high-value digital transfers and a kill switch to disable digital payments. The RBI's basic instinct was that sometimes the problem with instant payments is that they are too instant.

And Arush, as it turns out, has found a rather different use for that same convenience. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample. of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.