SEBI's Project Sudarshan has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in combating fraudulent financial content on social media platforms. According to the SEBI Annual Report 2025-26, the AI-powered intelligence platform launched in November 2025 has identified over 20,000 instances of fraudulent content and posts across social media within just a few months of operation. As reported by Mint, SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey emphasized that this digital vigilance is further necessitated by their latest Investor Survey, which revealed that 62% of investors are influenced by finfluencers - many of whom operate without accountability or verified performance data. The growing influence of financial influencers has made such digital monitoring increasingly important as investment advice increasingly migrates to social media platforms.
Project Sudarshan represents a significant technological advancement in regulatory surveillance, described as an AI-powered RegTech platform that represents a paradigm shift in surveillance, moving from reactive monitoring to proactive, real-time intelligence gathering. According to the SEBI Annual Report 2025-26, the platform utilizes advanced multimodal AI to analyze spoken language, visual cues, and contextual intent, including content in regional languages. By integrating these signals with behavioral and regulatory parameters, the platform assigns risk scores and generates structured, audit-ready alerts, transitioning surveillance from manual to automated processes. The system is designed to continuously monitor publicly available content across social media platforms, allowing SEBI to scan a much larger volume of social media content than would be possible through conventional oversight alone.
The platform is specifically engineered to detect deceptive practices including 'guaranteed return' claims, fraudulent certifications, impersonation of regulated entities, and the provision of unregistered investment advice. As reported by Mint, SEBI has invested in technology and data analytics as core supervisory tools, ensuring that while the market scales, the safety net for investors scales even faster. The regulator has also introduced initiatives such as validated UPI handles, the SEBI Check facility, and verified app labels on Google Play to help investors distinguish legitimate intermediaries from fraudulent operators.
SEBI's latest investor survey reveals the significant impact of financial influencers on investment decisions. According to the SEBI Investor Survey 2025 as reported by Mint, 62% of investors are influenced by finfluencers, with 93% of respondents finding finfluencers to be moderately to highly reliable. The survey found that 62% of respondents had made some investment decisions based on finfluencer recommendations, while YouTube (91%), Instagram (64%), and Facebook (61%) emerged as the top sought social media platforms among investors for securities market information. For SEBI, the challenge is therefore not simply the volume of financial content online, but the extent to which investors trust and act on it. Despite this influence, Pandey stressed that technology alone cannot replace informed investing, with investor education remaining central to SEBI's strategy.
