The Scammer Next Door

In India, an era of glaring inequality is also a golden age of fraud.

OCTOBER 28, 2025

I always answer calls from unknown numbers. This quirk has benefited me immensely. For example, one day in 2020, when I was at home in Delhi, I answered my phone to hear that I had won a lottery for Rs 25 lakh ($28,400).

The timing couldn’t have been better; my life was at a crossroads. For some time, I had been contemplating a break from full-time employment to embark on a personal project; my sole concern was the wisdom of using my savings to take the plunge. A windfall of Rs 25 lakh would certainly come in handy.

The caller asked me to check my WhatsApp messages. And there it was — a signed and stamped, apparently authentic cheque from the State Bank of India flashing my six-figure key to a new future. Somewhere in the cascade of messages was a poster declaring me the winner of a prize endorsed by some of the most influential people I could think of: Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister; Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest industrialist; and Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous film star. Their faces formed a triangle around the string of zeroes that would relieve my financial worries. The caller told me that, if I merely followed his instructions, all that money would reach my account in a minute. I should next ring a man called Ravi Kumar, a bank manager in Mumbai, and spell out my lottery number (1122). Kumar would then take me through the minor, almost imperceptible, taxes and processing fees that I might have to pay to initiate the bank transfer.

The caller asked me to check my WhatsApp messages. And there it was — a signed and stamped, apparently authentic cheque from the State Bank of India flashing my six-figure key to a new future.

There was one slight problem, though, I pointed out to the stranger on the other end of the line. I hadn’t bought a lottery ticket. He, naturally, had an explanation: Everyone using a SIM card sold by Mukesh Ambani’s telecom company was eligible to win a payout. It was meant to promote a TV game show hosted by Amitabh Bachchan and was funded by none other than Narendra Modi. Every single day, he went on piously, someone in India earns Rs 25 lakh through no effort of their own — thanks to the vision of three powerful men coming together to do something for a nation in distress. This was, after all, March 2020: The Indian government had just imposed a nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19. Although only a handful of infections had been reported by then, the shutdown of factories and offices put the livelihoods of millions at risk.

A lottery prize might not fit any conventional model of policymaking. But at that moment, against the backdrop of an incoming pandemic caused by an inscrutable virus, nothing seemed impossible. 

The TV game show he was talking about was Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), the official Hindi adaptation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I knew, like any other Indian, that it was hosted by Amitabh Bachchan and sponsored by Ambani’s Jio Telecom. I also knew that a few years ago, Narendra Modi had launched a lucky draw initiative offering prizes from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1 crore ($113,600) for low-income individuals using digital wallets. The initiative was aimed at promoting his vision of a digital economy, with the government directly transferring prize money to winners’ accounts as a “Christmas gift.”

I checked online: Apparently KBC was reaching its 20th anniversary in a few days. I should have known: I had a clear memory of watching its first episode back in 2000, when it was first introduced to India’s excitement-starved television audience the startling notion that earning money could be entertaining. Contestants stood to win the fabled Rs 1 crore by correctly answering 15 questions within 60 minutes. India was waiting for a game show that matched its hustling fin-de-siècle ethos, marking an irreversible break from the socialist values that had defined its first few decades as an independent nation. About to celebrate a decade since the economy opened up to global capital, Indians were no longer embarrassed about wanting more. Rupert Murdoch, who ran Star TV at the time, gave them KBC. It was he who decided on the prize money of Rs 1 crore, an unimaginable sum for an ordinary Indian then.

A patina of respectability was essential. And so, the questions (“No question too small,” promised the tag line) would be asked by Bachchan, who had by then starred in 150 films in more than 40 years. Just a month before the show’s debut, Bachchan, then 57, had become the first Indian actor to be honored with a wax statue at Madame Tussauds, and he brought his commanding presence to a show that promised to make getting rich quick respectable. Freshly liberalized India was looking for an “Indian Dream,” and KBC provided one.

I watched it with my family, fresh out of high school — all of us swept up in KBC’s promise of overnight prosperity. Now in 2020, with this phone call, I was being told that I was on the brink of realizing that childhood fantasy.

Sadly, I knew it was not true. If I were to follow his instructions, I knew he would end up richer — not me. I told him we needed to talk. It went like this:

What’s your name?

Rana Pratap.

I know what you are doing.

What am I doing?

You don’t need me to tell you that.

You have to trust me.

I don’t need a lottery prize.

Everyone wants a lottery prize.

What I need is a job. Do you have one for me?

Customer ko jhanse mein la sakte ho? (Can you trap a target on the phone?)

I’m not the first person to interrupt a scam artist mid-spiel to inform them that they’re wasting their time. However, while most people might hang up, block the number or even report it to the authorities, I had something else I needed to do.

So, when Rana Pratap told me I had won the lottery, I felt I really had. I finally had an opportunity to explore the empire of scams as one of its foot soldiers.

I had been waiting for a call like this.

In my everyday life writing about scams and fraud, it was generally me who would call up suspected conmen to inquire about their motivations and methodologies. Not every scamster agreed to speak with me, certainly not on the record, but enough did for me to have built up an insider’s view of their world.

Many spoke about a recurring shortage of workers. The scam industry was growing faster than new recruits were coming in. The attrition rate was abysmally high. Some people joined only to gather the know-how so they could launch their own outfit. Working conditions were harsh, and turnover high; too many quit soon after they started, I was told. Rookies fell out with their bosses all the time, who, in turn, complained about the impossibility of getting good help these days. People were often hired solely on the basis of their willingness to work. If you offered to join them in their scheme, you were no longer an outsider. Even the masterminds shared a few things with you.

So, when Rana Pratap told me I had won the lottery, I felt I really had. I finally had an opportunity to explore the empire of scams as one of its foot soldiers. 

We arranged to continue our discussion the next day. I was still pretending to be a jobseeker. He requested I avoid daytime calls due to his busy schedule managing back-to-back calls with other “winners.” He mentioned he could only relax after 10 p.m., though he was obliged to answer calls at any hour, whether it was 2 a.m. or 4 p.m. He sighed audibly, in a put-upon manner.

When we next spoke, I could hear him chew his dinner. Occasionally, a female voice asked if he needed anything — dal, roti, sabzi . . . Was that his mother? We don’t have any time for chit-chat, he scolded me, while washing his hands under a tap.

Our meeting started with him sharing some facts about himself. Rana Pratap was 19 years old, and he lived with his family in Old Delhi. The previous year, he had dropped out of college to join an uncle in the lottery business. “Fake. Nothing about what we do here is real,” he told me crisply. “Fake lottery, fake cheque, fake address of the bank.” He wanted to ensure I grasped the full extent of the deception. “Totally!” I assured him.

He mentioned his two business partners, both relatives, and revealed that in just three months, he had already generated Rs 70 lakh ($79, 500) for their “company.” “People are falling for it easily in the lockdown.” He sounded bored of their unending misery. “On a good day, we can make a minimum of Rs 50,000.” And maximum? “No limit. It can even be Rs 1 crore.”

My salary would be Rs 45,000 a month, three times the average wage for a qualified individual in regular employment in India. “Kaam kar logi?” (Will you be able to do this?) he asked me in Hindi.

I needed a moment to take in what he had just told me. The idea of winning Rs 1 crore had driven countless Indians to try their luck at KBC, dedicating years to memorizing trivia with no assurance of ever being able to compete on the show. (The prize money stands at Rs 7.5 crore currently.) Only a handful took home the prize. And here I had a stranger confess he could earn Rs 1 crore by spinning lies over the phone.

He may have been lying to me. Even so, the idea that telling lies could win you an enormous sum of money faster than mastering facts fits in with the shifting realities of our times.

To underline how quickly money could be made, Rana Pratap told me that before dialling my number the previous day, he had just gotten off a call with another woman. She had given him a total of Rs 3.5 lakh in “taxes and fees” to receive her prize. “She was ready to keep paying, but her bank stepped in with a fraud warning. She called me back, abused me and then blocked my number.”

He wanted me to make calls for him. He made it clear that I would not reach the exalted heights of being an actual business partner in their company but would only be an employee. My salary would be Rs 45,000 a month, three times the average wage for a qualified individual in regular employment in India. “Kaam kar logi?” (Will you be able to do this?) he asked me in Hindi. I could tell he was unsure. He admitted, however, that it was easier for women to reel in the targets. The last time he was on a call with a man, all he agreed to pay was Rs 10,000. “Who pays Rs 10,000 to receive Rs 25 lakh?” He sounded outraged at the man’s parsimony, like he was shaking his fist at the sky. He knew male scammers who used a fake female voice on the phone. He wouldn’t go that far himself — “No way!” 

We spoke again a few days later. He sounded more serious this time. Switching on his internal recruiter, he asked me to tell him a little bit about myself: my name, age, family details, etc. I had it ready for him: Pooja Sharma, 25 years old, lives with a roommate in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar and has one previous job (salary Rs 20,000), one internship and one older sister.

I didn’t just invent Pooja Sharma. Three years before the scam call with Rana Pratap, I had created a fictional resume for a character with minimal qualifications seeking employment in Delhi. At the time, a colleague and I were investigating why online recruitment portals were bursting with job ads when data suggested the formal labor market was shrinking. The rate of unemployment was at a 45-year high in 2017-18, according to government statistics. Even men with formal, salaried jobs only took home Rs 12,000 ($136) a month on average; women earned even less.

In real life, a fresh college graduate would spend years searching for a decent job. On the internet, though, it was a different story. Multiple multinational companies were apparently insisting they were eager to hire them the very next day at twice the average Indian salary.

Posing as jobseekers, my colleague Samarth and I delved into this discrepancy. According to the resumé I created, Pooja Sharma had recently arrived in Delhi armed with a degree from a regional university and certificates from short courses in spoken English and computer skills. Each of the job ads included the phone number of the human resources person who would guide the applicant to the next stage. We called up dozens of these numbers every day. 

Naively curious about how they saw the moral implications of their work, I asked these employees how they felt about swindling unsuspecting people in Houston or Glasgow. They clearly struggled to feel sorry for wealthy Westerners.

Every HR person sent us to a recruitment center for an interview where we were asked to introduce ourselves in English. The interviewer then would give us the address for another location, a training center where we were supposed to take classes in how to talk persuasively over the phone. From there, we were redirected once again to the so-called offices of the companies that had advertised the positions. In those meetings, our would-be bosses told us to make mock phone calls to prospective clients to gauge our ability to convince strangers about the merit of an imaginary product.

After months of navigating dubious locations, we finally uncovered the products we would be tasked with selling, should we accept these job offers. Each job trail we followed unveiled a different scam. At one of the companies we visited, an army of fresh graduates spent their working hours convincing vulnerable strangers in Western countries that their computers were attacked by nasty viruses that could only be tackled with security software marketed by their companies. Not only was the virus remotely fabricated, but the software they sold for hundreds of dollars was also fake.

Naively curious about how they saw the moral implications of their work, I asked these employees how they felt about swindling unsuspecting people in Houston or Glasgow. They clearly struggled to feel sorry for wealthy Westerners. They only spoke about how it felt to finally get a salary at the end of a month: They felt relieved, respected and competent. Scamming was the first time they had felt valued in the labor market.

At another company, the focus was on scamming Indians. New recruits were given a script and a stolen database of jobseekers, and every call began with the same question: “Are you looking for a job or a job change?” Those who responded positively were transferred to a “closer” — a more experienced agent — who would persuade the “customer,” whether an engineer or a CEO, to pay hundreds of thousands of rupees as a “refundable processing fee” for securing coveted positions in their field.

Everyone received a job offer, but no one got a job. As one company employee told me after she quit her job, “Nothing was what it seemed to be. Everything was a lie.”

I had been drawn into the depths of India’s burgeoning call-center scam industry. Every few months, I discovered a new, cleverly concocted scheme operating out of makeshift offices across dozens of Indian cities and towns. These set-ups lured in thousands of hopeful young men and women, creating an underground labor market invisible to the police or to government statisticians. Their jobs centered on masterfully crafted lies delivered over the phone. Some impersonated tax officers to frighten British pensioners into draining their life savings into suspicious bank accounts; others peddled irresistible student loan offers to American high schoolers.

Those who survived in the business no longer saw cheating as immoral, nor did they fear the consequences of being caught breaking the law. After all, when the police did raid these underground call centers, it was the owners they arrested.

Most employees entered these jobs unaware of the nature of their duties. But only a few left once they were eventually told they were hired to be scammers. Those who stayed took a pragmatic view of their circumstances. Faced with mass unemployment, they viewed their choice not as turning down a particular job but rather as rejecting the prospect of any job at all. Moreover, if they felt distaste for a particular variant of the job, another awaited them eagerly. On some occasions, they only had to cross the street to start on a different scam. Having never worked at a place that wasn’t a scam center, the more experienced among them came to see their jobs as normal. Most spoke about their work without shame or fear.

Those who survived in the business no longer saw cheating as immoral, nor did they fear the consequences of being caught breaking the law. After all, when the police did raid these underground call centers, it was the owners they arrested. The employees were free to leave — and usually to find another similar job. The owners themselves usually remained in detention only briefly, released once bribes were paid on their behalf.

Each owner had his own backstory. Some had previously run legitimate call centers pushing foreigners to buy things from global corporations, before finding a use for their persuasive skills that they saw as only marginally more problematic.

Others were themselves former employees of scam centers who had squirrelled away enough to launch out on their own. I also encountered complete outsiders foraying into this world in hopes of making a fortune. 

After coming out on bail, they often went on a long holiday before starting a new company that was ready to hire fresh graduates on a day’s notice. 

It wasn’t surprising that Rana Pratap, like most of the scamsters I talked to, was willing to explain exactly how his schemes worked. They did not seem to view this work as morally problematic or at least did not expect me to judge them for it. Or perhaps Rana Pratap’s willingness to divulge details wasn’t born from trust but from a sense of impunity; he knew I couldn’t really touch him. I had only his WhatsApp number, and if it were reported, he would simply switch to another.

After our last phone call, Rana Pratap sent me a text with a link to download a mobile app. This app housed many databases of WhatsApp numbers actively in use.

The call was to be concluded by giving out a lottery number. The potential victims were to read it out to the bank manager, whose contact details would follow on WhatsApp. The bank manager would be played by one of his accomplices.

They looked somewhat familiar. Since the previous year, 2019, I had been reporting an article about the underground industry of data brokers who traded personal details of India’s rising consumer class. These middlemen purchased vast troves of information, ranging from phone numbers and home addresses to bank loans and shopping history, leaked by employees of financial institutions, e-commerce companies and other service providers. For as little as Rs 10,000, one could covertly buy a database revealing the contact information of tens of thousands of “high net-worth individuals,” or HNIs. Money changed hands through digital wallets, and the Excel sheets were shared over WhatsApp; no questions were asked, least of all about how the buyer intended to use the data.

Rana Pratap instructed me to choose about 50 numbers daily to call.

“When someone answers, start with a ‘namaskar’ [greetings],” he advised, echoing Amitabh Bachchan’s signature greeting on Kaun Banega Crorepati. I was to follow the script he had used on me, but I was never to reveal my real name unless directly asked. “If they ask, just say your name is Anjali,” he suggested.

The call was to be concluded by giving out a lottery number. The potential victims were to read it out to the bank manager, whose contact details would follow on WhatsApp. The bank manager would be played by one of his accomplices. “Keep the lottery number to four digits. Any combination would do. Like 1144.” “Keep it simple,” he stressed. “No show-baazi! Got it?” Overcomplicating things to show off or be clever would only jeopardize the scam. I was never to lose sight of my phone or let anyone else touch it. But, if I got into trouble, he promised to “take care of it.”

As my conversations with Rana Pratap continued, he frequently questioned my sincerity about joining his lottery scam operation. Once, he petulantly remarked that he had encountered many women who only gave out false hopes. I carefully did not ask him to elaborate.

I kept him talking, hoping eventually he’d be comfortable enough to meet in person. The initial COVID-19 lockdown restrictions had been eased, allowing for socially distanced, masked meetings, but he was evasive whenever I broached the subject of meeting face to face.

Not all needed a call center to execute a scam. They could create a fake investment app from their parents’ basement or hold foreigners to ransom from under a tree in a remote village.

Unexpectedly, one day, he called to abruptly end our discussions. Accusing me of wasting his time, he said, despairingly, that the only job I was suited for was washing his dishes.

He was calmer when I rang him a few days later. I came clean and told him my real name and my intentions. I said I was a journalist interested in profiling a KBC scammer. I asked if he would meet me for a proper interview. While he wasn’t offended that I had deceived him — though such a scenario would have been amusingly ironic — he expressed no interest in continuing our conversations, seeing no benefit in it for him. 

I had one last question that I managed to get in. I had long been intrigued by what he called himself: Rana Pratap was a 16th-century Hindu king famous for resisting the Mughal Empire. I asked if it was his real name. He said it wasn’t. Then he ended the call.

His phone has been unreachable since that day.

Rana Pratap and his home-grown start-up was the first time a scammer had approached me rather than the other way around. Things had come full circle. Someone had tried to scam me; I was now part of the story. It pulled me deeper into a world I had only explored in bits and pieces. Since I first wrote about the proliferation of scam call centers, I had been watching India’s shadow economy grow at an enviable pace even as the formal job market offloaded millions of workers. As inequality rose and the internet blurred the distinction between real and fake, I saw hordes of people waiting on the margins beginning to believe that fraud might be the only way to realize their ever-expanding aspirations.  

Not all needed a call center to execute a scam. They could create a fake investment app from their parents’ basement or hold foreigners to ransom from under a tree in a remote village. Every scam didn’t need a clever mastermind; in fact, many seemed to somehow spring from a collective imagination. Anyone who had an idea was inspired to execute it. An era of glaring inequality was also a golden age of graft. Networks of scams and fraud were entrenching themselves in every aspect of life in today’s India and beyond.

I began to put snippets from the newspapers, a personal database of clever swindles, in a wicker chest in my study. It outgrew the chest in weeks. Soon, the entire room was awash with clippings, each detailing a different duplicitous scheme — a depressing reflection of how scam culture was taking over my country, eroding our trust in each other.  

A new scheme might be designed by a housewife, an officegoer or a social media influencer: In India, it almost seemed like a scamster was born every minute.

Scammers steal details of missing children from a police database to dupe more than 900 parents by asking for money to reveal their whereabouts.

Villagers in Gujarat built a fake toll plaza and collected Rs 75 crore in a year from passing vehicles.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia district, more than 200 couples allegedly took part in fake marriages to receive benefits from the state government’s mass marriage scheme.

Two Indian influencers accused of a million-dollar investment fraud continue to inspire people on Instagram.

India has long been obsessed with stories of corruption. But my collection intentionally ignored the fraudulent exploits of billionaire heirs, tax dodgers and corporate magnates — defense contracts, government lobbying, bank accounts in Switzerland, shell companies in Panama, citizenship of Antigua and political asylum in London. Their tactics had long ceased to surprise me. A diamond merchant was as inconsequential to my research as a liquor baron. The narrative of the obscenely rich exploiting every link in the chain to amass more wealth — at the expense of shareholders, government banks and the people of India — was the old story. I was interested in the ingenuity of amateurs, not the polished deceit of the entrenched elite.

Our national experience was taking on a new dimension. For most of independent India’s 76-year history, we comforted ourselves with a trickle-down myth. We told ourselves stories of how corruption begins at the top. I was raised on stories — books, films, theatre, television — of how the powerful cheat the poor of money they cannot spare and of rights they cannot comprehend. This theme permeated my home life as well; my father, an officer in provincial administration, would frequently return home frustrated by the corruption he witnessed, from clerks demanding bribes to release someone’s pension, to senior ministers embezzling funds intended for public infrastructure. Anti-corruption pledges are ubiquitous in political party manifestos, but no election cycle in India is considered complete unless news emerges of parties financing their campaigns illegally.

The grassroots fraud that captured my attention was more complicated. Traveling across India, I discovered a complex and multilayered landscape of deceit. Ordinary people were cheating the government ingeniously, often with help from inside the system. In today’s world, I learned, fraud flows freely: from top to bottom, yes, but also from bottom to top, side to side, underground to over, in endless loops of deceit. It happens not only between governments and beneficiaries but also among neighbors, colleagues and Facebook friends. A new scheme might be designed by a housewife, an officegoer or a social media influencer: In India, it almost seemed like a scamster was born every minute.

I had already spent years following young Indians chasing their dreams. Dreaming was a new pastime in a country long considered fatalistic. I had met twenty-somethings who genuinely believed they could be “the richest person in the world” — an unthinkable ambition before the internet had expanded their horizons to the edge of the world.

But this was still an obscenely unequal country: The top 10 percent hold 80 percent of India’s wealth and the bottom 60 percent — 840 million people — less than 5 percent. More often than not, their dreams of wealth, power, influence and fame went unfulfilled. I wrote a book about what happens when the barriers separating them from their chosen futures are harder to penetrate than they imagined; now, I began to wonder what a system that provided no chance of advancement meant for the very natural pursuit of upward mobility. Does it create a vast population of small-time hustlers waiting for a big break? If only each of them could come up with a scheme of their own. Or perhaps they were doing that already?

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After I received that call from a stranger, I kept an eye out for the words “KBC lottery.” That phrase had replicated itself across web domains, YouTube channels, Twitter (now X) accounts, Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups. Those operations were clearly managed by different individuals.

The supposed cop helpfully left his personal phone number for you to call. If you did, he would ask for a “fee” to initiate the investigation.

Oddly, most called themselves “Rana Pratap.” Some Rana Prataps sent private messages to the supposed lottery winners; some posted public lists of the names of winners (that read like a roster of the most common Indian names) and some ran a live quiz every day, inviting social media users to post the correct answer in the comments and claim the prize. The questions were risible:

1. When did the Kargil War between India and Pakistan take place?

A. 2022 B. 1962 C. 1999 D. 1964

2. What is the name of Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor’s husband?

 A. Akshay Kumar B. Saif Ali Khan C. Shahid Kapoor D. Ranveer Singh

3. In the Ramayana, who was Hanuman a follower of?

 A. Lakshman B. Dashrath C. Ravan D. Ram

It was impossible for any Indian even marginally awake to get any of these wrong. If successful, you were urged to call the same number. Absurdly, there was at least one user in every comment trail calling out the fraud and pleading with people not to fall for it, but nobody paid them any attention whatsoever. In fact, each of these call-out comments had a response from someone claiming to be an officer of the Central Bureau of Investigation promising to nail the scammer and return the victims’ money. The supposed cop helpfully left his personal phone number for you to call. If you did, he would ask for a “fee” to initiate the investigation. Not for the last time, I discovered that investigating scams can be another, even more profitable scam.  

Even when I wasn’t trying to follow Rana Pratap’s trail, he seeped into my life. One day a friend informed me that her cleaning lady had been duped into transferring Rs 25,000 ($284) to a scammer’s account with the false promise of a Rs 25 lakh ($28,470) lottery win. Later that week, I read a heart-wrenching newspaper story about a laborer named Pratap Barik in Odisha who, after losing Rs 80,000 ($911) to a scammer, threw himself in front of a moving train. Seconds before he did, Barik shot a video of himself sitting on the railway track. “I am going to end my life. I have all the details about Rana Pratap on my phone.” Then he tossed the phone away from the tracks. The police went through his phone but could not trace the Rana Pratap who had tormented Barik.

Reported victims of the KBC scam were scattered across the country: a 56-year-old woman in an upscale part of Mumbai, a 62-year-old retired government teacher from Uttarakhand, a 32-year-old housewife from Karnataka. One of them actually lost Rs 50 lakh, half of the coveted Rs 1 crore prize. 

As the number of complaints surged, the government intervened by issuing a public notice on social media platforms. It emphasized that the lottery calls had no links with the government, despite scammers prominently featuring the prime minister’s photo alongside those of Bachchan and Ambani on posters sent to the so-called winners.

I diligently kept tabs on the suspects apprehended by various police departments across the country. The list included an engineering graduate from Odisha, a school dropout from Uttarakhand and several unemployed men from West Bengal. None of them was named Rana Pratap.

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Two months after befriending one Rana Pratap, I heard from another. This one had barely finished breaking the news when I interrupted him to say I wanted a job, not a prize. He replied promptly, saying he did need an extra pair of hands. Rana Pratap II ran a Facebook page promoting his KBC lottery scheme that had over 50,000 followers. The platform, however, capped the number of posts he could make daily. This is where I would come in. He told me my job would be to post a fixed number of updates every day: fake quizzes, fake lottery announcements and fake investigation claims from fake CBI officers. Once again, I was offered a monthly salary of Rs 45,000. That seemed to be the industry rate for new recruits.

During a pandemic that had stripped millions of their livelihoods, I was being offered an entry-level wage higher than what 90 percent of the formal workforce earned, all for disseminating misinformation.

I couldn’t help dwelling on the bitter truth this offer revealed. During a pandemic that had stripped millions of their livelihoods, I was being offered an entry-level wage higher than what 90 percent of the formal workforce earned, all for disseminating misinformation. I would get a commission, too, for every person who called his number after seeing an update I posted.

He was eager for me to join him. “Bahut ehsaan hoga.” (You will be doing me a favor.) Unlike the first one, Rana Pratap II wasn’t swimming in scam money. A month had drifted by since anyone took the bait. He believed a partner was just the thing he needed.

“You might help me unlock my good luck,” he said, descending into self-pity. We agreed to speak again the following day, but when I tried to reach him, the number was consistently unreachable. When the phone was finally answered, I heard a female voice at the other end. I asked if she knew Rana Pratap. She said I must have dialed the wrong number. I told her that was not possible. She seemed perplexed; I wasn’t the first caller to ask for Rana Pratap. In the past week alone, a half dozen people called in, saying the same thing. “They had spoken to a man on this number and paid him money to get a loan or something.” Disturbed by these calls, she even contemplated seeking police help.

The girl was 21 years old and lived with her family in a village in the district of Jamui in Bihar. At Delhi’s cybercrime police station, an officer revealed a troubling pattern: Many suspects in the KBC lottery fraud were traced back to Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, near the border with Nepal. On my last visit, they had detained a 19-year-old from there, who was arrested after a Delhi woman reported that she paid him Rs 16 lakh ($18,200) in made-up taxes for a non-existent KBC prize. They claimed his room was strewn with incriminating paraphernalia: 16 mobile phones, 73 debit cards, 30 SIM cards, 11 bank passbooks and two chequebooks.  

Similar arrests had occurred across various districts in Bihar, including Siwan, Gopalganj, Patna, Nawada and, notably, Jamui, where my call to Rana Pratap II’s phone had ended up. Jamui, in fact, surfaced in police investigations repeatedly. One small village in the district, Mangrar, was identified as a hub for the KBC scam, with “millions” of rupees pouring in through mobile-phone-based fraud. Exaggerations aside, the report did hint at an alternative, almost inconceivable reality: Over a third of Bihar’s households survive on a daily income of Rs 200 ($2.2) or less.

I asked the girl on the phone if anyone else used her mobile phone. Occasionally, her two younger brothers, she said. Could one or both of them be up to something? She said she didn’t understand what I was referring to.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to encounter scenarios where scammers hid the nature of their work from their families. Those from regular, law-abiding households feared their families would be horrified if they found out. Some, particularly those who saw scamming as temporary — to support their family until they found a job or to raise funds for a legitimate business — worried that if they confessed, this weird set-up would suddenly get very real. Once spoken of, there would be no getting out.

I wondered how this young woman would react if I told her that her brothers might be using her phone to run a lottery racket. What if it wrecked their relationship? I decided to let it go. The last thing we said to each other was, “Take care.”

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The fear of being scammed is a primal emotion, as fundamental as the need for love, uniting humans across time and borders.

Nobody knows exactly how many people in India have made scamming a career. But even by rough estimates, our fraud industry employs multitudes. People are drawn to it as a source of income, as a key to social status and as a path to political power. 

In researching my book, I met dozens of scammers. Some called me “didi,” big sister; to others, I was “ma’am.” I conducted proper interviews with some, sitting across a table and using a notebook. Many wanted to talk more casually; they took me home, introduced me to their children and offered me tea. A few insisted on secrecy, making sure nobody watched — no informer, no rival, no one from their neighborhood — and no notes were taken. Some would call every few weeks to bring me up to date on their lives, and some never wanted to see me again.

Stealing from Indian government officials, notorious for bullying those below them in the chain of power, was worn as a badge of honor. The easiest to cheat were strangers — those about whom they knew nothing.

Like practitioners of any other trade, not all scammers think and act alike. Some take great pride in breaking down their method. They will clarify the mechanics of a stealthy money transfer from the victim’s account to their own; they will have you pretend to be a victim so they can act out a script; and they will take pains to show the minute differences between an actual document and a forged one. 

Some will open up only to put out their side of the story. The one thing the scammers had in common is a deeply held belief that they were not the only people to blame. They all speak of the irony that many people in positions of power and privilege — bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen — lie, make false promises, enrich themselves at the expense of others, and get away with little damage to their careers.

But if asked how they actually felt about their victims, the scammers’ answers always depended on their relative position in some real or imagined hierarchy — one shaped by caste or class, by race, religion, citizenship or bank balance. Cheating someone in a wealthy Western country rarely sparked guilt, whereas draining the bank account of an Indian retiree sometimes led them to question their choices. Defrauding the state was universally seen as fair game — most scammers believed politicians only achieved power through fraud anyway. Similarly, stealing from Indian government officials, notorious for bullying those below them in the chain of power, was worn as a badge of honor. The easiest to cheat were strangers — those about whom they knew nothing.

Their world may have been dangerous, but the scammers were not ruled by fear of the law. And for good reason: India’s overburdened police treat fraud as a low priority. Even when complaints turned into cases and were taken to trial, legal proceedings might drag on for years.

Many of my sources had been charged under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, the provision dealing with “cheating and dishonesty.” Like much of India’s policing system, Section 420 is a relic from the British Raj. Yet, it has permeated our consciousness in ways that transcend the courtroom. In many Indian languages, there is no specific word for “fraud.” We have terms for theft and deceit, but nothing captures the precise act of scamming. Without a hint of awkwardness, we describe a perpetrator of fraud as well as their actions as “420.” When a society lacks even the vocabulary to describe a particular wrongdoing, it’s perhaps not surprising that it doesn’t always judge it harshly. We use the term jokingly, ironically, even affectionately. One can be found legally guilty under this section without necessarily being branded a criminal.

Some of those I met were used to getting out on bail. Only one was still in jail at the time of writing, and that’s because the run-of-the-mill scheme he was a part of became entangled in a bloody border conflict.

The scammers lived in perilous circumstances, and it was not hard for me to sense the fear they carried around with them. But the one thing I looked for repeatedly, and usually in vain, was remorse. The world in which they moved had no place for guilt. It had been hardened too much for an emotion so soft.

✺ Published in The Dial

Read our conversation with Snigdha Poonam about reporting on global scamming networks in India and beyond.