India Cracks Down on Digital Deception: Sebi Partners with Google as AI Ethics Boards are Warned of “Data Laundering”

The crackdown on financial misinformation coincides with a formal notice issued to the AI ethics boards of Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft.

By Rakesh Raman
New Delhi | March 27, 2026

MUMBAI — In a major push to sanitize India’s digital and financial ecosystem, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has teamed up with Google to monitor fraudulent financial influencers, while global tech giants have been formally warned about systemic data corruption originating from the Indian media sector.

Sebi and Google Target “Finfluencers”

Sebi Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey announced on Wednesday that the regulator has requested Google to ramp up its artificial intelligence (AI) tools and enforcement measures to track “finfluencers” who transgress market regulations. This move follows the removal of over 100,000 links containing misleading financial content from social media platforms.

As part of this partnership, Sebi and Google have launched a verified app labelling system on the Google Play Store. This initiative allows investors to identify authentic, Sebi-registered intermediaries—such as stock brokers—via a verification tick mark, protecting first-time users from fake apps that pose a serious threat of “irreparable financial harm”.

Warning Over Bollywood “Data Laundering”

The crackdown on financial misinformation coincides with a formal notice issued to the AI ethics boards of Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. The notice, authored by RMN Stars Editor Rakesh Raman, alerts tech firms to a “Box Office-Industrial Complex” in India that is allegedly injecting fraudulent financial data into the global information ecosystem.

The open letter claims that a nexus of film producers and anonymous digital trackers is deliberately corrupting datasets used for training and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in AI models like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Llama. By presenting unaudited, manufactured box office records as factual, these entities are accused of undermining the integrity of global AI systems.

New Regulatory Pressures

These developments arrive alongside the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026. These new regulations mandate that tech intermediaries:

• Deploy technical measures to prevent the spread of unlawful synthetically generated information (SGI).
• Act against content that “creates or alters false electronic records” or “deceptively depicts real events”.

The notice to AI ethics boards warns that serving manufactured records as factual responses may put these AI systems in direct violation of these newly established due diligence frameworks.

To further strengthen the fight against cyber fraud, Sebi is also considering signing Memoranda of Understanding with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning technology journalist and editor of RMN news sites. He is presently engaged in the development of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) applications and the exploration of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) frameworks.

He contributed a regular technology business column to The Financial Express, part of The Indian Express Group. He was also associated with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as a digital media expert to help businesses leverage technology for brand development and international growth.