Thirty years inside banks, watching this get worse.

I am Amiit Roy Chowdhury. I spent more than thirty years in Indian financial services, in senior roles at HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, and I now run a BFSI education business and a financial marketplace. Pehra is not a security company's product. It is one banker's answer to the calls I kept getting.

The calls were always the same

A friend's father had moved money to a "safe account" because an officer on a video call told him to. A cousin's son had paid a fee for a work-from-home job that did not exist. Each time, the person had been reachable by phone the whole evening, and each time nobody had been told until it was over. The fraud had not out-thought them. It had out-paced them, and then kept them alone.

Why the existing answers do not fit

I looked hard at what already exists before building anything. Truecaller's family protection is free and sits on hundreds of millions of Indian phones. Sanchar Saathi is free and government-backed. Android's own fraud protections are free and already installed. The paid antivirus suites sell detection, and the whole Indian consumer antivirus market is only a few hundred crore rupees. Anybody selling scam detection in India is selling something three large free products already do.

So Pehra does not sell detection. The checking is free, for everybody, forever. What nothing in the market does is the hour after the loss — the police complaint written correctly, the bank letter with the right words in it, the portal answers, addressed to the right district cyber cell. That is where people are abandoned, and it is where a small product can genuinely matter.

The two decisions I am most sure about

First, the rescue paperwork stays free. There was a version of this business where the complaint drafting was the paid feature, and the numbers worked better. I will not put a payment screen in front of a frightened person asking for their own police complaint. What is paid for is covering four other people — which, as it happens, is also who actually pays.

Second, we collect almost nothing. After the backlash against mandated government security apps, an Indian product that reads your messages and takes your contacts has already lost the argument. We ask for four things and we can prove it: this website's privacy page matches our Play Store disclosure line for line, deliberately, so that neither can quietly drift.

What I will not claim

Pehra cannot block another app's camera, cannot shut off your home wifi, and cannot detect a cloned voice mid-call. No app can do any of those, and several products imply otherwise. Saying so costs us a marketing line and buys something worth more.

Pehra is being built under BFSIJob Education LLP in Thane, Maharashtra. It launches on Android first. If it helps one family avoid the call I kept receiving, it was worth building.