Amazon India and IIT Delhi, together with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), have announced the winners of RAKSHAM, a national AI cybersecurity hackathon that challenged young innovators to build AI-based tools against emerging cyber threats and improve digital safety.
The hackathon drew nearly 5,000 student submissions from 14 states. After an online submission round and two rounds of jury evaluation held over two days, 30 teams were chosen as finalists, and five winning teams were identified. The winners received cash prizes ranging from ₹25,000 to ₹2 lakh.
Participants worked on problems such as voice cloning, fraud detection, AI-driven scam-pattern interception and deepfake detection. They were encouraged to go beyond demonstrations and build solutions that could be tested in authorised environments, work reliably, scale responsibly and respect privacy. The aim was to help identify fraudulent activity, detect manipulated content and recognise scams before they cause harm.
The top five teams will showcase their solutions at Amazon Smbhav 2026 on December 10 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, in front of senior Amazon leaders and representatives from government, industry and academia.
Representatives of the three organisers said that as AI makes digital services more accessible, it also gives cybercriminals new ways to exploit people through deepfakes, voice cloning and sophisticated scams. They said RAKSHAM brings together government experience, industry and academic expertise, and fresh ideas from young innovators, and that they hope participants take their prototypes further into reliable, scalable tools for crime prevention and citizen safety.
IIT Delhi’s student technical clubs and its outreach office helped plan and run the event, and the organisers noted that AI advances have made it harder to tell real content from manipulated content.
The jury included representatives from I4C, Amazon and an industry partner. The initiative builds on the ongoing collaboration between Amazon and I4C to promote safe internet use and raise awareness of online scams, and to encourage responsible technology adoption.
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