Straight answers, including the awkward ones.

Paste it into Pehra and you will have an answer in about three seconds, with the three reasons behind it. Without the app, four signals catch most of them: it asks for an OTP, a PIN or a card number; it gives you a deadline today or within the hour; it tells you not to discuss it with anybody; or it arrives from a personal mobile number while claiming to be an institution. Any one of those four is enough to stop.

Three things, in order of how much they help. Agree a family safe word that is never written down or sent in a message, so a cloned voice can be caught in one question. Tell them plainly that no bank or government office ever asks for an OTP and that anybody who hurries them is lying. Then put a checking app on their phone and set it up yourself rather than asking them to — Pehra’s family cover exists for exactly that, at ₹759 a year for five people.

It is a script, not a legal process. A fake officer keeps a person on a video call for hours, shows forged documents, forbids them from telling their family, and demands money to settle a case. No Indian agency arrests anybody by video call, and none asks for money to close a case. Reported digital-arrest cases in India fell sharply through 2025 as awareness spread, but the script still works on people who have not heard of it. Put the phone down; nothing happens.

Call 1930 and get a complaint number. Telephone your bank and use the words "fraudulent transaction", asking them to block the account and raise a dispute. Delete nothing — messages, call logs and screenshots are your evidence. Write down times and amounts while you remember them. Then tell one family member, because shame keeps people silent and silence is what the fraud needs. Under RBI rules on unauthorised electronic transactions, reporting within three working days can mean nil liability for you.

No, and it never asks for the permission. What you choose to check is analysed on the phone itself and then discarded. It is not uploaded, not logged, not read by any person, and not used to train anything. Pehra also never asks for your contacts, call log, location, photos or files. Registration asks for four things: name, mobile, pincode, and an email only if you buy family cover.

Yes. All 68 scam families are stored inside the app on the phone, which is why it answers in a lift, on a train, or on one bar of signal. An internet connection is used only to receive library updates and area fraud warnings, never to perform a check.

Everything that protects the holder of the phone is free forever — unlimited checks, Panic Mode, the police complaint and bank letter as PDFs, the safety walkthroughs, and the verified helplines. Family cover costs ₹759 a year and extends all of that to up to five people, with area fraud warnings in each person’s own language. It is sold inside the app through Google Play; there is no payment form on this website.

Not during a call, and we will not pretend otherwise — no app can listen in on a WhatsApp call, and even laboratory detectors are unreliable. What Pehra does instead is give you a question a fake cannot answer: a family safe word stored only on your phone, plus four live tests to use mid-call, including asking the caller to turn fully sideways on video and wave a hand across the face, which is where synthetic video still breaks.

Yes, and fast. Under India’s 2026 amendments to the IT Rules, platforms must remove high-risk synthetic content — morphed images, impersonation, non-consensual material — within two hours of a proper complaint, three hours for a court or government order. Do not pay anybody, do not delete the evidence, report it in the app and call 1930.

Hindi and English, both fully, with a toggle at the top of every screen. It can be spoken to and it reads its answers aloud, using the phone’s own speech engine at no cost. The letters it drafts are written in English by design, because that is what every police station and bank counter in India accepts, even when the app has been speaking to you in Hindi.

Remove the app and everything held on the phone goes with it. To erase what sits on our side, use the deletion form on this website — you do not need to reinstall anything, and Google Play requires us to give you that web route. We confirm deletion by email where you gave one.

BFSIJob Education LLP, in Thane, Maharashtra, founded by Amiit Roy Chowdhury, who spent over thirty years in senior roles in Indian banking including HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank. Pehra launches on Android first.