What is digital identity theft, and how to check if your PAN is misused?

At a glance

Digital identity theft is someone using your leaked personal details — most commonly your PAN, sometimes with Aadhaar — to open a loan, credit card, or bank account in your name without your knowledge. You can check for it yourself, for free: your Annual Information Statement on the Income Tax e-filing portal shows high-value transactions linked to your PAN, and a credit report from CIBIL or another bureau shows every loan and card ever opened against it. Check both periodically, not just when something feels wrong.

Educational resource only. This explains digital identity theft and how to check for PAN misuse in India, in line with the safe-handling ideas behind India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act); it is not formal legal advice.

What digital identity theft actually looks like

It’s rarely a stranger “hacking” your accounts — it’s usually your PAN or Aadhaar detail, leaked or lifted from a document you shared, being reused to impersonate you on paper. The common patterns: a personal loan taken in your name using a leaked PAN and a forged signature, a SIM card issued against your identity for use in fraud, or a shell transaction routed through your PAN to disguise someone else’s income. You often don’t find out until a lender calls about a loan you never took, or a credit application you make gets unexpectedly rejected over an unfamiliar default.

Check 1: Your Annual Information Statement

The Annual Information Statement (AIS) on the Income Tax e-filing portal tracks high-value financial transactions linked to your PAN — and it’s free to check any time.

1. Log in to the Income Tax e-filing portal with your PAN and password (or Aadhaar-OTP if linked).
2. Go to Services → Annual Information Statement (AIS).
3. Review the transactions listed — deposits, high-value purchases, mutual fund or securities transactions, any income reported against your PAN.
4. Flag anything you don’t recognise as a potential mismatch, and use the portal’s built-in feedback option to dispute it directly against the entry.

This won’t catch every kind of misuse (a fraudulent loan below the high-value threshold may not appear), but it’s a genuinely useful, free first pass — worth checking every few months rather than only when you suspect a problem.

Check 2: Your credit report

A credit report shows every loan, credit card and credit enquiry ever run against your PAN — including ones you never applied for.

1. Get your report from a credit bureau (CIBIL, Experian, Equifax or CRIF High Mark) — most offer one free report a year, and several apps and bank portals surface it as well.
2. Verify your identity with your PAN, mobile OTP, and basic personal details.
3. Go through the accounts and enquiries sections line by line — every open loan, every credit card, every lender who has pulled your report recently.
4. Anything you don’t recognise — an account you never opened, an enquiry from a lender you’ve never dealt with — is your first sign of possible misuse.

Checking this once or twice a year, not only when applying for credit yourself, is what catches misuse early rather than months after the fact.

Check 3: SIM cards issued in your name

A SIM issued against your identity without your knowledge is one of the more common vectors behind the fraud patterns this piece already describes — and it’s directly, freely checkable, unlike a lot of identity-theft risk. The Department of Telecommunications runs a portal (TAFCOP, accessible through the Sanchar Saathi platform) that shows every active mobile connection linked to your identity documents.

1. Visit the TAFCOP portal via sancharsaathi.gov.in.
2. Enter your mobile number and verify with the OTP sent to it.
3. Review the list of active connections shown against your identity.
4. For any number you don’t recognise, mark it as “Not my number” or “Not required” and submit — the portal generates a tracking reference and initiates action with the telecom operator.

This matters because a SIM issued in your name can be used to intercept OTPs meant for you, register accounts that appear to trace back to you, or route fraud in a way that’s harder to disentangle than a purely financial account. Checking it alongside your AIS and credit report — not instead of them — gives a genuinely fuller picture, since each check catches a different kind of misuse the others don’t.

Is there a “credit freeze” in India?

Not the one-click universal freeze some other countries offer — India’s system relies more on monitoring and disputes than a lock you can flip on and off. A few bureaus offer a paid “lock” feature to subscribers, but there’s no single, free, guaranteed freeze across every bureau the way there is in some markets. Practically, that means the two checks above — AIS and your credit report — carry more weight here than they might elsewhere: catching a fraudulent entry early and disputing it fast matters more when there’s no blanket freeze standing between your PAN and a new loan application.

What to do if you find misuse

Move on three fronts at once — the bureau, the lender, and law enforcement — rather than picking just one.

1. Dispute it with the credit bureau directly through their portal, flagging the specific account or enquiry as fraudulent.
2. Contact the lender or bank that opened the account or ran the enquiry, and ask them to investigate and close or reverse it.
3. File a report with the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (cybercrime.gov.in) or call the cybercrime helpline 1930 — this creates an official record, which matters if the dispute drags on.
4. Keep everything in writing — dates, reference numbers, and copies of every complaint — since resolving a fraudulent account can take weeks and a paper trail is what moves it along.

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