43 CASE STUDY: MAHARASHTRA POLICE FORCE Nearly 2.27 million cybercrime cases were reported to police in India in 2024, according to I4C, the national agency set up by the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs to prevent, detect and prosecute cybercrime. With police investigators now working on approximately 200 cases each per month, and more than 228 billion rupees ($2.5 billion) lost to cybercriminals last year, the Maharashtra police force turned to AI to help its teams better defend its civilians. The initiative began in April 2025 with the force rolling out a customer crime investigation platform, MahaCrimeOS AI, to 23 police stations in the Nagpur Rural district, in Maharashtra. It now plans to extend the solution to all 1,100 police stations across the state. Before using MahaCrimeOS AI, police officers would typically spend two to three months gathering information for a cybercrime investigation, manually contacting banks to understand what funds had been transferred, writing statements and gathering evidence like mobile numbers and IP addresses. Now, it takes investigators about a week to complete these tasks and hear back from service providers. “With a few clicks I can request the call detail records of multiple numbers,” said Ashish Singh Thakur, assistant police investigator at Nagpur Rural. “I don’t have to draft the letters; they’ve been drafted by MahaCrimeOS AI. And I don’t have to worry about missing out information or making mistakes in my letters and having to start all over again.” Civilians can also supply evidence like social media accounts, mobile numbers or screenshots of text messages and bank statements to support a complaint. All this information, whether it is in a PDF file or a handwritten note in English, Hindi or local language Marathi, can be uploaded, extracted and filed in their respective sections by MahaCrimeOS AI in minutes, freeing an investigator from tedious manual work to create a case file. Microsoft partner CyberEye worked closely with the Microsoft India Development Center to build the engine powering MahaCrimeOS AI. CyberEye incorporated Maharashtra’s police investigation protocols and made the platform available in Marathi. It also added an investigation copilot, built using Microsoft Azure Open AI Service in Microsoft Foundry, to analyse case information, generate automated workflow and suggest investigation pathways. The platform also has built-in access to India’s criminal laws and open-source intelligence, which can be used to link crimes and locate suspects. “Now [investigators] have a digital companion,” said Harssh A Poddar, superintendent of police at Nagpur Rural. “It certainly builds a lot of professional capability, [which leads to] more self-confidence and much better decisionmaking for officers at all levels.” Maharashtra police force uses a Microsoft-powered AI copilot to investigate cybercrime in India Fighting cybercrime with digital assistants Nagpur Rural Police attend a training session on using MahaCrimeOS AI Photo: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft
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