Being scammed doesn’t mean you’re stupid — it means you’re human

The stories span from QR code cons to elaborate job interviews, fake police calls, and investment apps mimicking the Reserve Bank. One particularly chilling format is the digital arrest scam. Victims get a call from someone posing as a narcotics or police officer. The caller ID is spoofed to show a legitimate number. There’s mention of a suspicious parcel, a legal case. The victim is told they’re under watch. Sometimes, they’re ordered to stay on a video call, mimicking police custody. Legal notices follow. Bail money is demanded. It’s a theatre — designed to provoke not just fear, but obedience. And it works.

Digital scams are not amateur crimes. These are like corporate productions — with scripts, actors, and direction. These “scam factories” operate like call centres, many allegedly run out of China, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Some are staffed with trafficked workers, including Indians, forced to impersonate officials using CRM tools and call scripts.

Why is this happening now?

India is in the throes of a digital awakening. UPI crossed 118 billion transactions last year. Over 800 million Indians carry smartphones. However, while access has grown exponentially, digital literacy has not. We know how to scan QR codes, but not how to check if a payment link is real. We know how to email résumés, but not always how to verify a recruiter.

Scammers know this. And more importantly, they understand emotion. Behavioural economists call it “loss aversion” — the tendency to fear losing what we already have more than we value gaining something new. That’s why scam messages often begin with a threat: “Your account will be suspended. Your Aadhaar is under investigation.”

Beyond the threats, they dangle fantasy: a foreign job offer, a lottery win, a fellowship at Harvard. Scammers understand aspiration as well.
Most scams build incrementally: a message, then a call, then a request. Each small “yes” nudges the next. Psychologists call this the “commitment and consistency principle” — once we’ve started engaging, we feel pressure to stay consistent with our previous actions, even if doubt creeps in.

In the mid-2000s, Carnegie Mellon researchers tested phishing susceptibility on undergraduates. The students were tech-savvy. But over 90 per cent clicked at least one malicious link — not because they didn’t know better, but because they were confident they wouldn’t be fooled. The researchers concluded that overconfidence, not ignorance, made them vulnerable. India’s scam economy has weaponised this insight.

As Maria Konnikova writes in The Confidence Game, the best cons work not by showing us who we are, but by reflecting who we want to be: the informed citizen, the desirable job candidate, the savvy investor. That’s the unsettling part. Scams don’t happen despite your intelligence. They happen because of it — because you’ve learned to trust systems.

And that’s also why people don’t talk about it. There’s shame. Especially in the age of personal branding, where we’re all trying to be smart, credible, bulletproof. But when we only hear about “other people” getting scammed, we reinforce a dangerous myth: that these things happen to the gullible. They don’t.

What we need is a cultural shift — to normalise the idea that being scammed doesn’t mean you’re stupid; it means you’re human. We need to build scam literacy into our digital education. Teach it in schools. Embed it in banking systems. Say it in public campaigns. And above all, we need people to speak.

The writer is a consultant at AON