Artificial Intelligence and Cybercrime: Emerging Legal Challenges in the Digital Era

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has transformed cybercrime from a game of scale into one of synthetic realism, enabling voice cloning, deepfake impersonation, and hyper-personalised phishing that have cost India over ₹22,495 crore in 2025 alone. This article examines India's improvisational legal response to AI-enabled fraud, tracing how the Information Technology Act 2000, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, and the 2025 synthetic media amendments retrofit pre-AI statutes onto novel crimes. It analyses the Delhi High Court's emergence as a de facto first responder through personality-rights litigation, alongside persistent evidentiary hurdles under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam's certification regime. Situating India within a fragmented global mosaic spanning the EU AI Act, US state-level statutes, and the UN Convention against Cybercrime, the article identifies three unresolved fault lines — attribution, supply-chain liability, and the tension between labelling mandates and free expression and proposes decentralised forensic capacity, a dedicated AI-enabled crime aggravator, and treaty ratification as reforms.