India remains ‘an obscenely unequal country’; scams are operations anchored in caste and community networks: Snigdha Poonam

Poonam: I first dipped my toes into what I call the underworld of scams and fraud several years ago, while finishing my last book, Dreamers. This would have been around 2016. So, we’re talking about just nine years ago. The final sections of the book had taken me, rather landed me, in the world of scam call centres.

The last chapter, titled “The Scammers,” is set in this subculture of call centres on the outskirts of Delhi, where I saw thousands of young people already working in operations that targeted victims in the Western countries— America, Britain, and other parts of the Western world— through all sorts of schemes and spin-offs.

I found I couldn’t leave this world behind because I had already made some connections, and I could see that it was expanding at a rapid scale. The attitudes of the people working in these call centres were hardening — towards their work, towards the moral implications, towards the victims. There was a growing sense of total indifference.

Meanwhile, the techniques were evolving. They were finding larger and larger catchment areas in the West. But then I also started to see something else: this was beginning to turn inward. Scammers started targeting groups of victims within India. In a sense, it became a very domestic-focused industry, even as international operations continued.

If you pick up a single newspaper, you’ll find countless stories of scams and frauds. Every new scheme seemed unimaginable: mind-blowing in its ingenuity, its scale, its ambition. We only ever read about victims, not the scammers, because they operate in the shadows.  And so I started to wonder: what is the best way to write about a world that is not supposed to exist?

Since I had already established a foothold in that world, I decided to return– this time to dive all the way– one scam at a time – in and spend the next few years exploring this underworld. That was the origin of Scamlands.

Q. You’ve written that caste and community networks often underpin regional fraud operations. Can you elaborate?

Poonam: If you go to these villages, as in many rural areas in India, you will find caste and community groups living in different parts of the same village. So there is already a high degree of segregation, along with a high level of inequality.

For centuries, the lower-castes — Dalits, OBCs — have worked for the upper castes in one way or another: in the fields, in factories, in construction-based businesses, or in coal mining. That hierarchical structure has been in place for a long time.

When mobile phones arrived, younger people began to explore the darker potential of this new technology.  Many who felt excluded from more legitimate ways of approaching upward mobility discovered that they could use these tools of fraud. Some of the scammers I spoke to told me they were trained while still in school, in the fifth or sixth standard, by older boys from their own caste or community networks. In many ways, schools mirror the social structure of villages: boys from the same caste and community cluster together.

For instance, if someone were from a Dalit community, he would often say someone had trained him in the same community. And from there, these networks became even more deeply anchored. When a new scam emerged – say, an e-commerce scam – there was already an existing network.

From there on, it became increasingly embedded in community networks: the scamsters divided tasks, trained one another, and managed different parts of the operation.

In some cases, if multiple profitable scams were unfolding at the same time, communities divided them among themselves. One village might specialise in a particular lottery scam, another might focus on e-commerce fraud, while yet another would continue running the familiar “your ATM card is expiring” scam.

Q. Is aspiration the primary driving force for these groups?

Poonam: Even though Scamlands continues from where Dreamers ended, and while my jumping point was aspiration, I soon realised the story was more complicated. While millions of young people carry extremely ambitious dreams for themselves in India, not one of the people I wrote about came anywhere close to realising their dreams. Some of them began making troubling moral compromises; one among them was to turn to scams. So, while my lens was still aspiration — the desire to go up the income ladder— I realised that aspiration alone wasn’t driving the story.

The regions I went to were completely swept up in a frenzy of duplicity. There were also regions marked by poverty, deep inequality,  discrimination, injustice and alienation. It became clear to me, not that far into the story, that fraud often became an individual’s default response when society failed them.

What the book does is show larger and larger swaths of the population being swallowed up by fraudulent activity — not just young people, not just people who had extraordinary ambitions. Almost everyone could see that scams offered a way to lift themselves out of systems that otherwise seemed unbreachable.

So, it isn’t aspiration alone powering these scams. In many stories, the main engine is survival. In a country where vast segments of the population have never been given the opportunity to “level up,” this becomes the option they latch on to. The book begins with the story of the Jamtara scams and shows how they became a pathway for young men from marginalised communities to force their way into an economy that had long shut them out.

Alongside survival, you also see intense political discrimination, caste equality and a sense of vengeance. Take the story of fake death scams in Barpeta in Assam, where fraudsters take out life insurance for dead people, all to steal money from the government of India’s subsidised life insurance programme for the rural poor. Until discovering this scam, my only sense of this region was that it was synonymous with the local people’s struggle to prove to the state that they are Indian citizens and not intruders from across the border.

Yet this was the place where I saw individuals plot and execute one of the most daring schemes targeting the Indian state. How do you make sense of that? The fraudsters in Assam seemed to be exploiting weaknesses in the welfare infrastructure, but they were also taking a hammer to a system that overlooked their existence.

Ultimately, the book argues that these structural inequalities have hardened us– they have eroded our basic sense of empathy. One of the callous ways it shows up in the scam economy is romance scams, where women pretend to be in love with men so they can run off with their money.

An Indian woman who is working for a fake dating app run by a shadowy Chinese company tells me she doesn’t feel a tinge of remorse targeting male users of the app because she thinks of her own vulnerability navigating public spaces as a woman. The fake dating apps — where she can construct any identity for herself– allow her to turn the tables, even if briefly, and she takes a certain pleasure in that fleeting sense of power.

Honestly, if I hadn’t written this book, I too might have assumed that scamming was simply something young people did because they wanted to make lots of money.

Q. What surprised you most in your interactions with the scammers themselves?

Poonam: Very few scammers I met saw what they did as a criminal activity. Earlier, I thought that if you were taking just Rs 400 from someone, it might not feel like the end of the world. But these scams are more like elaborate heists than minor thefts. Yet, the people I met did not see it as a crime. I made sense of it by thinking that the activity was never individual — it was always a collective, organised effort.

The book thus focuses on highly organised systems in which entire regions, even whole populations, are involved in these operations. If someone has earned a large amount of money from scams and wants to hide it, they might turn to an ally from an upper-caste community because the latter’s home is less likely to be raided.

These networks extend into local elections, panchayat elections, even parliament elections where fraud money becomes a major source of campaign funding. So, going back to your question, it becomes difficult for an individual scammer to feel they are doing something wrong when everyone around them is also participating. From the grandmother who keeps scam money hidden in her chest to the police who take bribes to avoid pressing charges.

I kept asking why the lack of empathy — why it becomes so easy for scammers to see the person on the other end of the phone as the ‘other. And I think it goes back to the caste system. Not only is caste an effective tool of oppression, but also one of turning the tables. When people want to level the field, seek revenge, some turn to scams.

Q. You write that “the story of fraud is the story of globalisation—and perhaps, vice versa.” How has the digital boom transformed this into a borderless enterprise?

Poonam: One of the scammers I spoke with took me back to 2014. We had a new regime, a new prime minister who was very keen on digitalising the whole economy. He said to me, ‘This meant that someone sitting in an office in Delhi could, with one click, transfer money to their mother in Jharkhand’. But it also meant that someone in Jharkhand could, with that same click, take money from someone sitting in an office in Delhi. And then of course, he goes on and on about various other steps in India’s technological journey — digital wallets, cryptocurrency and so on.

I remember being absolutely stunned when I found out that some of the young Indians who are trafficked to foreign countries and forced to work as hostages in these scam operations actually get paid in cryptocurrency, not cash. I was talking to someone from Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, who was trapped in a scam centre in Myanmar, and he had to tell his family in rural Uttar Pradesh to download Binance (a global platform for cryptocurrency exchange) so they could convert his earnings into cash. It is globalisation by stealth.

Most scams in operation today are exploiting tenets of globalisation; fraud is no longer any one nation’s problem. Most of the scams featured in the book are already transnational or can very easily be exported or imported.