How cyber fraud became an industry

For representative purposes | Photo Credit: Getty Images Many people, especially in urban areas, have realised the perils of picking up calls from strangers and giving them their bank account or other personal details after being lured by tempting offers or frightened by threats. Responding to this surge in cybercrime, the government mandated telecom operators to replace caller tunes with public service announcements warning us all to be on guard. A 2020 Netflix series set in Jamtara in Jharkhand had some success; now, we have the first of what is likely to be a subgenre of books studying these scammers’ techniques.Also Read: Cyber Fraud Network: three arrested, 507 bank accounts linked to accused frozenWhile the scams have caused great distress to those who have lost their hard-earned savings, they have enriched groups of youth beyond their wildest dreams in many villages, from Jamtara to the Mewat belt spanning Rajasthan, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh. In hitherto forgotten areas, where generations have lived in squalor, palatial houses have cropped up where roads barely reach, and the land isn’t arable.Motorcycle showrooms with thick order books have emerged, selling models that would otherwise only sell more than once a week in tier-1 showrooms. And it did not take Chitradeep Chakraborty, author of Jamtara Calling (Rupa Publications), more than an hour to find someone who was willing to describe the entire ecosystem that allows fraudsters to con unsuspecting victims and make them part with their savings.The art of adaptingThe book is a good entry point into the way ‘scamming towns’ work. Much of it is about an extended field trip in Jamtara, with a cab driver turning fixer. Chakraborty sparks up lengthy conversations with key operators, while pretending to be an executive from a telecom operator (he doesn’t say which one, but it isn’t hard to hazard a guess). The days-long outing, which he chronicles in this slim volume, sketches a town where desperate circumstances and sudden digitisation gave birth to a cottage industry that operates with impunity. So much impunity, in fact, that nearly every operator he recalls meeting spills out the secrets of his tradecraft — it is usually a man — after a little more than a friendly introduction and a cup of tea.What Chakraborty finds is that “cybers,” the shorthand that scammers have adopted in this region, constantly adapt to changing circumstances. Scams take place in phases, since awareness about them is spreading fast. In response, their techniques get more sophisticated. When scammers realise that their method of tricking people to give up their one-time passcodes has stopped working, they move on to convincing people, using an ingenious math-based exploit, to give up their ATM cards’ PIN instead. And when that stops working as well, they pretend to be retired Army personnel and start hawking non-existent furniture and bikes on platforms such as OLX and Quikr. He finds that the local police are happy to turn a blind eye to the whole sordid business as long as they get a share in the profits. But that isn’t the case when scammers make the mistake of fooling a Member of Parliament or a senior bureaucrat; in those cases, the police storm the town and arrest the odd lynchpin. But cases hardly stick, given the clogged criminal justice system and the ability of the nouveau riche scammers to hire expensive legal representation.Beyond call scamsIn Bharat Bluff (Roli Books), another breezy read, Soumya Gupta takes a macro view of the economic and legal conditions that permit the industrialisation of scams. For instance, India still does not have a stringent data privacy law in force (the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 comes into force next year). She also examines the broader sweep of dishonesty on the Indian internet, from fake identities on Instagram targeting well-off liberals to Chinese loan apps charging usurious interest (if at all the loans are legitimate to begin with).Snigdha Poonam’s Scamlands (Penguin Viking) widens the scope of studying this fraud. She applies a quasi-pop anthropological lens on the hustlers of Jamtara and elsewhere, refining an approach that she had used with great success in her 2018 book, Dreamers. Scamlands takes an expansive and meditative approach, trying to probe into the inner lives of the newly rich and their devastated victims alike. The book also takes the reader around the world through the globalised pig-butchering industries — large-scale, tech-enabled financial fraud operations — in Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, and their victims in the U.S.The “cybers” in all three books cause tremendous damage. In one instance, they leave two members of a family dead and one aimlessly exploring Jamtara in search of answers. The books’ response to the question of motive boils down to opportunity (enabled by cheap mobile data), penury, and greed. While Chakraborty attributes some of their eventual capture to unlucky encounters with powerful victims, Poonam’s reporting suggests that successfully duping the rich and famous became a coveted status symbol.There are enough explanations to go around for how the scam industry grew so massive — on the victims’ end, an unfamiliarity with the rapidly evolving internet; on the perpetrators’ end, entire villages left behind with little by way of social mobility; and a weak rule of law that makes it difficult to dismantle the industry and deter would-be cybercriminals.While the books, particularly Gupta’s and Chakraborty’s, offer in-depth advice on how to avoid falling prey to scams, perhaps the best way to do so is to understand how the ecosystem came about and persists. After all, learning about fraud is in and of itself a cautionary tale. Published - August 27, 2026 08:30 am IST