Snigdha Poonam on the Political Economy of Transnational Scams

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, where we examine the academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I am a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. 

Today my guest is Snigdha Poonam who is a journalist and writer. She is the author of the new book Scamlands and also the author of the 2018 award winning book Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World.

We talked about the scam industrial complex in different states like Jharkhand,  Assam and Tamil Nadu in India, the interaction between the scam economy and the formal economy, the transnational scams in China and Cambodia and how they are connected to India, the aspirations and traumas of the scam work force and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts. 

Hi, Snigdha, welcome to the show.

SNIGDHA POONAM: Thank you, Shruti. I’m really glad to be here.

The Scam-Industrial Complex

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m so excited to read this book. Normally, when we think about a scam, scandal, or fraud, it seems like an outlier event, like this one-off thing where the rest of the economy is sorted and is functioning in a regular above-ground way. There’s this one weird thing that’s happening, whether it’s a phishing scam, gambling scam, or whatever else it could be.

What I learned from your work is, it’s much bigger than that. It’s incredibly organized. It’s happening at an industrial scale. It’s got all the characteristics of all other major sectoral activities, right? There’s very organized capital around it; there is very organized hiring and labor around it. Sometimes, of course, even the people working in these scams are tricked into it, but it’s done in this very, very organized, large way, that it interacts in enormous ways with the formal part of the economy. All the standard tools of verification and paperwork and digital infrastructure are used in these major phishing scams, and all the pig slaughter scams. 

What you end up getting is almost like this parallel avenue. It reminds me of the parallel economy you have in war times, or a parallel economy you have during Prohibition. There’s this formal part of the economy, and then there’s this whole other thing which is going on, which is very, very organized, incredibly large, impossible to trace and shut down. That was the first sense that I got from reading the entire book. Am I on the right track, or were you going for something completely different?

POONAM: Absolutely, you are. That’s why I was trying to make some notes for myself because it’s something that I had to be very clear about, setting out to write this book, in that I didn’t want to write stories of these dazzling individual scamsters, or really standout gangs that—some guy who’s married 65 women, and each one’s a fraud at an extraordinary scale. I didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to look at scams as an organized economy, because I think I’ve had that sense for almost 10 years now. I had to let go of a lot of crazy-sounding stories of mostly just one person or a small group carrying out these scams, that feel very exciting to read about but don’t tell you much if you’re trying to really find out what’s happening at the societal level.

On Jamtara and the Economics of Joining a Scam

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe we’ll start with India because that’s a little bit more familiar to me. I think now the Jamtara phishing scams are pretty well known. There’s a Netflix series about it. It’s been well covered in the newspaper. Lots of people have been arrested. The police that did the investigation have been applauded and awarded and all sorts of things. It seems to be the most salient, in some sense, in our minds, at least in India, Jamtara as a location. 

What you track is something much more interesting than the phishing scam, because what you’re getting into is: Who would want to join a scam like this? What are the incentives of the people who are running it? What are the incentives of the people joining it? If we start layering the incentives a little bit more, it’s not just about the individual person’s incentive. It’s also about communities. It’s like why would someone who is, let’s say, a graduate from a relatively disenfranchised community, or why is someone who is a young person who has an engineering degree, or no job—why are these people actually attracted to this kind of work? Why would they risk this level of criminality to begin with?

What did you find one layer deep, two layers deep, why these guys are doing this? It’s a reasonable way to make money in a world where there’s massive unemployment and underemployment. Even the locations you go to are not exactly the fastest-growing districts in the country. There’s a real economic crisis brewing in these places. What do you find, two layers in?

POONAM: I had met this cyber police officer in Delhi before I set out for Jharkhand, my home state. He had been working on these Jamtara scams for three years. He told me, “This is the story. You go to these villages, and there are hundreds of villages. In those hundreds of villages, you think about hundreds of thousands of people earning millions of rupees every month from these scams.” That, to him, was the story. In some sense, that wasn’t wrong. The numbers, the scale, the ambition, I found all of that to be true. Within days of actually hanging out in Jamtara, it was quite clear to me that that alone—just the numbers, ambition, and scale—wasn’t the story. I think there were so many other things going on.

One of the things that blew my mind away quite early on was just how many levels of participation there were in the community. Then I find that sort of replicating across not just Jharkhand, but also I show a similar structure in Assam. Of course, there are multiple other places that don’t even get into the book. Something similar was happening in all these places. At the core of all of these communities is a vast set of young people out of college—maybe college dropouts, school dropouts—say anywhere between 15 years old to 25 years old. You view hundreds of them in just one cluster of villages. They are the ones who are actually making the calls that go out from Jamtara.

Then in a single village, you will find every other person is involved in some way or the other. There are a number of people who have legitimate respectable jobs. Within a week, I was running into panchayat chiefs whose job it was to put up bail when a cyber chor [thief] was arrested, because he’s respectable; the family will give him a couple of rupees to put a bail. That’s how it rolled out. You have these banking correspondents, what are called the customer service points. They have a very specific role in the rural economy, but they also help these scamsters route the scam money by opening bank accounts in their name and then collecting the scam money in their accounts, and then sending it out through various financial legitimate channels—as you said, the linkages between the formal economy, and the shadow economy.

There is a public health center, in the case of Assam, where a doctor works full-time, and his job is a real job, except that when someone dies, and then the scamster wants to take a life insurance policy in the dead guy’s name, he still has to sign the death certificate. You are an economist, so you’ll appreciate this. The whole economic side of it just blew my mind away, just how organized it was, how everyone knew the role that they had to play.

There used to be these e-commerce delivery guys who, especially in the Jamtara scams—when they scam you, when they’re inside your bank, often they don’t want that money to come into their bank, not even like an associate’s bank anymore. They will go to an Amazon or eBay and then buy a number of luxurious things, and then they’ll send that to a fabricated address somewhere around their village. The delivery guy knows that address doesn’t exist. He knows where to deliver it, and for each delivery, he’ll have a cut. I have called it the “crook’s economy” somewhere in the book. I think that the crook’s economy, and not just these hundreds of thousands of boys as the police officer had portrayed to me, among many things, I think that was one of the things that I knew that I had to go deeper into.

The Moral Logic of Scamming

RAJAGOPALAN: One of the things I want to talk a little bit more about, and this is specifically about what is happening in Jamtara, but more broadly in Bihar, Jharkhand, and UP, that kind of region. For something to be this broad-based and cutting across class and caste, everyone’s involved, like you said. Everyone from the head of the panchayat to the delivery guy to the young kid who has just come out of college, but his parents have no real means. For something like that to take root, everyone has to think that what is happening is not wrong at some core level.

POONAM: Yes. Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: That is what kept jumping out to me throughout what you were telling me. What it seemed like was they have almost confused aspiration, and the desire to make money and earn a living for their family, with something respectable. No one thinks this is not a respectable thing to do, in some sense. Of course, it’s not as respectable as getting an engineering position, or a government job, or a nice white-collar job in a stable economy. 

Normally, what we used to call charso-beesi [section 420 of the Indian Penal Code]—people who are fraudsters and who are looked upon as fraudsters—this, all the teeny middlemen who are engaged in this broader scam, no one’s really judged very harshly for it. Am I misreading the way you portrayed them in the book?

It almost seems like they all have reasonable justifications for doing what they’re doing. They can’t find jobs. They have responsibilities. This is a way to make money. They’re only really stealing from the rich. In the process of stealing from the rich, they’re not harming anyone. They’re not murdering. They’re not mugging anyone. There’s harm, but there’s no face-to-face harm. In that sense, they seem to think that they have no victims and nothing terrible is happening. Is that a good way to think about what’s going on in these villages?

POONAM: Yes. In a lot of these scams, yes, they can’t see what the real damage is. If they’re stealing from someone, they already know the distance between Jamtara and Delhi or Bombay. Even if they’re making a random call—usually they’ll just type in random numbers, and they can be connected to anyone. They are hoping that they get connected not to someone in the next village, but someone in Delhi, Bombay, or Bangalore, where the distance, not just physical but social, between them and their victim is vast enough that some of that moral guilt, that burden, starts to lessen. That was very common.

The other thing is that, yes, as you said there, if everyone is involved, then how can you feel easy? Some of these people are very young. One of the protagonists that I have in the early chapters is in school. He’s in seventh or eighth class when he starts to train in these camps. When do you even start to build that sense of right and wrong, if you begin that early? Everyone is in it—everyone in the school is; every other boy is doing these scams. They are the ones training him. Then who in this scenario can be the highest person in this community for him to look up to, the local MP or the local MLA?

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re all involved. [chuckles]

POONAM: They’re all involved. They are funding their campaigns through the scamsters’ scam money. Then they are protecting them. There are actual live clips of the MLA from the region saying, “If our boys are so clever, then it’s something to think about.” Like they are not to blame; the people who are losing these vast sums of money in Kerala, Maharashtra, and Delhi should think about what they are lacking in terms of sense and reason. 

In a lot of these places, there was a considerable amount of pride amongst very high levels of society. Even the police guys—every time I went into the cyber police station in Jamtara, they started the story of how the original mastermind from Jamtara defrauded Amitabh Bachchan. To everyone, if you go there tomorrow, they’ll start the story still with Amitabh Bachchan, because the police people, even if their job is to investigate the scams and arrest these guys, also take pride in it. Yes, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that they don’t feel very concerned. There’s not much guilt or shame.

How the State Enables the Scam Economy

RAJAGOPALAN: Now, the second layer of this is how the state is involved. Here, I don’t just mean state functionaries like an MLA, but the state actively. In the Jamtara scenario, you have an entire new digital infrastructure. I won’t say the state has imposed it on people. Of course, there’s massive adoption of UPI and Aadhaar, all those sorts of things. It’s a layer in a society which was not very legible, and which didn’t have very high levels of digital literacy, and which didn’t have high levels of trust, and trading with strangers. It didn’t have all those checks and balances built into the analog economy. Now, the pretense is, “Oh, in the analog economy it’s very hard to build trust, but in the digital economy, it’s much easier to build trust.” Why? Because we have Aadhaar numbers and OTPs and KYCs and blah, blah, blah, right?

Now, these guys have figured a way out to undercut the checks and balances built in the digital economy. As always, the state is two steps behind. That’s the sense that I got when I looked at what’s happening in Jamtara. Immediately, your chapter—I think it’s the chapter right after that, the one in Assam—it’s like half the problem is the state. 

It is the massive amount of paperwork that is required of people in a way that they sometimes literally need to prove that they are themselves. They have to show up to places. There is this poor woman who says, “Hey, I’m alive, and I’m not dead, and someone’s faking my death and collecting my life insurance money. There are 17 middlemen involved in proving that I’m dead and completely erasing my identity.” It’s impossible to prove that you are the person who’s now being portrayed as dead. The state is involved at every level.

First, the state demands half of this paperwork. Second, the state doesn’t have the capacity to issue half the paperwork. We don’t have good state registries of properties, or assets, or registering wills and things like that. What you end up having is this crazy scamster economy, which was entirely almost sitting on the foundation of this state dysfunction in that area.

POONAM: Yes. I think in both the chapters, the infrastructure was already there for the scamsters to invent a scam that best fit that of the openings left.

Inside Assam’s Paperwork and Insurance Scams

The story from Assam is centered on a particular district. It’s called Barpeta, not very far from Guwahati. It’s just a couple of hours’ ride in a car. It looks at a scam economy that stretches far beyond Barpeta. Again, we’re talking about a region rather than one village or even a cluster of villages. Think about dozens and dozens of taluks, blocks, and tehsils. 

What they do is insurance scam. It sounds really straightforward to begin with, but it’s one of the cleverest things that I’ve ever come across. It all hinges on people’s deaths—let’s say mostly untimely deaths. If there’s a man, he’s a 40-year-old, he’s out fishing in a pond, and he gets struck by electricity and he dies. The moment that he dies—maybe he’s taken to the primary health center, and then his body is taken onwards to his house. 

In that very brief time, the word spreads to a really large network—again young men, jobless—of these insurance scamsters, who will then decide that they need to move quickly. They will approach the family; mostly maybe if he has a wife, he’ll ask the wife. They’ll try to bribe the wife and put forward this proposition that “we are going to take out a life insurance policy in this dead guy’s name,” this guy who is already dead, and then allow for some time to pass, maybe two months, sometimes less than two months.

After that period passes, they will then show that the man has died, produce a fake death certificate for him, and claim the insurance money. Most of them were doing this to exploit a scheme started by the prime minister, an insurance policy that the prime minister started to stretch the benefits of life insurance to the vast sections of rural population that had until then been completely cut off from the life insurance sector.

The scheme spread so rapidly that by the time that my colleague and I arrived in Barpeta, we could hardly think of anyone who had died in this manner. Sometimes it would be a road accident, like a 25-year-old guy’s on a motorbike, and he has an accident, and he’s dead. Before the next day, they have a line of insurance scamsters waiting at the doorstep trying to strike a deal with the family.

Then again, like you mentioned, how can you show someone to be dead if you don’t have the complicity of the whole local governance structure, including the government doctors? The number of certificates that needed to have been produced, including in some cases, people didn’t have to die. They didn’t even have to be born. They created whole individuals out of thin air.That would mean showing that someone was born, that someone went to school, and then so on and so forth . . . then, finally, this nonexistent person.

RAJAGOPALAN: They fill the paperwork around a fictitious person, right? They have a 10th-standard pass certificate. They have everything that one requires. . .

POONAM: The school principal will sign. The local passport photo guy will produce a passport photo to go with this nonexisting guy, passport photo that belongs to a real individual. Yes, again, on a structural level, this was massive.

RAJAGOPALAN: Couple of questions on that. What I found super interesting in what was going on in Assam is, there are two points of entry here. One is, you see that there are these crazy number of insurance scams going on, but if you really look into that, they’re really scamming the government. There’s one kind of scam, where there’s a fictitious person created out of thin air, and now the government’s going to issue a life insurance policy or at least subsidize life insurance policy. Who are you scamming? You’re scamming the government.

There’s a second layer to it where they’re scamming real people who are alive but pretending they’re dead. This is like Aisha who’s estranged from her husband, and the family is now pretending or at least trying to prove that she’s dead so that the husband is then free to do whatever he wants—she’s not just an estranged wife, she’s a dead wife—and also make money off of it. Meanwhile, she is going pillar to post to prove to people that she’s alive. The two scams feel slightly different to me, though everyone involved is similar.

In one, there is a very obvious person who’s been harmed, who’s right there in front of you struggling. And in another one, it’s like a nameless, faceless state and some union government scheme which is being milked. The two somehow have a different texture to it. When you talk to these people, do they sound like they understand this difference? Or is this now just at each stage, it’s like paperwork being signed, no one knows what’s going on?

POONAM: Yes. In the case of Assam, I think the justifications came much quicker and more fluently, because in that, who is being scammed? Yes, the government is, but then the government is also benefiting from it. Even just after I finished a story, you had the finance minister represent the data from the number of people that had benefited from this scam, who had taken out life policy and whose next of kin had already been—

RAJAGOPALAN: Padding up the government numbers in some sense, even if they’re not outright benefiting; they’re losing money. But they’re showing up as if this is all good data.

POONAM: This is all a really beautifully run system, in which maybe the government of India and the finance minister do not know this in Delhi, but the representatives at that level of the taluk/tehsil village know very well what was going on. I’d also reported another really big story from the same region of the farmers’ scheme, the scheme in which the government deposits, I think, around 6,000 rupees in every farmer’s bank account in three installments. I think the government just kept on boasting about 30 lakh people had been given out, had been beneficiaries, but actually half of them didn’t exist. 

In every other household, my colleague and I would find someone had been invented again—a nonexisting person—like one person opening four accounts, someone pretending to be a farmer when they were a bank officer, and everyone knew.

The people who were even distributing the scheme at the local level knew what was going on, and they would still keep quiet because they had to show the numbers, and the numbers would keep traveling upwards in files until they reached Delhi. The Delhi had to show the numbers as 30 lakh, 60 lakh, 90 lakh beneficiaries. I don’t think that if these people thought that defrauding the state wasn’t the greatest crime, then maybe they did have a point.

The Politics of Legibility in Assam

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, the state is complicated in the northeast. The union government is half the time an enemy quite explicitly, not an ally. It also matters which government and which scheme. The people don’t take very kindly towards what is coming from Delhi in some sense. I imagine that there’s no guilt associated with it.

There was something even more curious that I learned from your chapter in Assam, which is, there is a paperwork and legibility economy, which is running parallelly because of Assamese politics. This is a state which is famous for having a very big internal clash over ethnicities and immigrants. And people who belong to Assam and who don’t is really up for challenge even after all these decades. There’s one layer of who is ethnically Assamese and really belongs to the land. That’s one layer of what’s going on. The second layer of it is, of course, what happened with the Bangladesh war, and there were settlers who crossed the border. That’s another layer of what’s going on.

The third layer is, of course, the standard clashes over religious lines. Even if you’re an Indian Muslim who’s Bengali-speaking, now you’re under suspicion of having been someone who was associated at some point from crossing the border sometime between 1971 and today. This has caused lots of different things going on. There’re all sorts of legibility required to be on voting lists. There is, of course, the famous National Register, which Assam in some ways invented this idea, and which is now being sold to the rest of the country.

Everyone understands how complicated these politics are, and to solve for them, there is a paperwork and legibility economy, because all these people who are disenfranchised at some level have to prove that they exist. They have to prove that they passed 10th certificate. They have to prove that they always belonged to this land, or their parents were born here. There was always an army of middlemen and agents who specialized in either withholding that paperwork or providing that paperwork. Now the scam is a very convenient way to just rechannel those enemies and also make money off of it, not just politics off of it. Does that make sense, or am I reading too much into what’s going on in Assam?

POONAM: I think those were the two axes for me as well. There was that already, the politics of disenfranchisement. The fact that if you go to those areas, meet anyone, regardless of what they do, whether they run a shop or have a dairy, everyone’s main occupation is the struggle to prove for them or for someone else in their family that they are citizens of India. They’re not infiltrators, they’re not Bangladeshis.

Whether that takes showing their family tree going back generations, whether their grandmother crossed the border before the 1974—so many people have already done fantastic, phenomenal reporting from this part of Assam that I don’t have to describe just how inhuman that struggle is for most people that you’ll meet there. These scams that Sadiq [Naqvi] and I found were taking place in this context, and very much in the openings that this disenfranchisement had created.

As you said, every family—like I mentioned, most families have a common struggle. Every family has a middleman who is trying to—because a lot of these people also are paperwork-illiterate, so everyone has someone who will go to the offices. The foreigners’ tribunals, and the local there, every district has a local NRC office, and there are lawyers, who then if your appeal is rejected, you hire a lawyer to appeal the decision.

It’s a vast network of middlemen. There are also then people who will offer—if they don’t have legitimate paperwork, or if you’ve lost it, in a lot of cases—things have been lost especially in floods because it’s also an area that’s subject to floods. Once a year, they also have to leave all their belongings, sometimes tie them in loose polythene bags and just go away to a higher land, and then come back, so they lose a lot of papers.

If you’ve lost the paper, or god forbid, if your grandmother did cross at an earlier date, then you paid someone to make a fake certificate showing that. Some people had married twice, so they needed to show the newer wives’ legitimacy or citizenship. There was always someone or the other also trying to create a fake certificate.

I think those that then, again, created this economy that when you want to run a scam, like insurance scam at that level, paperwork is everything, death certificates and birth certificates and insurance forms. That comes in really handy.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s interesting. Normally all of us city people. . . I grew up in a big city. I’ve largely only lived in big cities. You think of big cities as the place where these sophisticated scams are going to pop up. You could never have this happening in Delhi or Bombay at this kind of scale because the precarity with paperwork doesn’t exist at the same scale. The presumption is, most people who are in Delhi or Bombay, even if they’re migrants, even if they’re relatively disenfranchised, already have . . . Most domestic help in Delhi will have their Aadhaar card and a ration card. They have some means of negotiating whatever they need with the state. Actually, the most sophisticated scam ends up happening in rural areas. That’s why you call this the new farming. [chuckles] This is not something that can really happen in a productive urban setting where a lot of the infrastructure that is required doesn’t exist. 

It’s also just a collapse in state capacity. I don’t just mean in finding the fraudsters or punishing them. The state is now incapable of doing simple things like counting people, figuring out who lives where, whose birth certificate is a real birth certificate. This is a collapse of the state at a level that doesn’t quite match the reality of how India is sold, or the Indian state is sold. Indian state does Aadhaar and UPI, and runs the largest election, and lands on Mars, but [chuckles] it can’t correctly issue birth certificates, or correctly monitor its agents to issue 10 standard certificates. It’s frightful.

POONAM: I think both points are quite relevant. These particular scams could not happen in the cities, although I grew up in small towns. I immediately relate to these stories and the context in which these scams are happening. I was telling someone that only a few years ago, I still had my bank passbooks, because I still do have the fear that if you lose something like that, you can never be able to access your money.

The state, yes, I think it’s failing in two ways. It is failing in even being able to track who the benefits are going out to. It was something simple as, if one person has five accounts, and in all of the accounts they’re getting money from the same welfare scheme, I think the state should be able to trace and stop that at some point, but it’s not. That’s one failure. 

The second failure is the numbers of people across the country that it has alienated in one way or the other, who feel completely cut off from any sense of progress or belonging—indeed, large sections of the population who feel like they have nothing to lose. In some sense, they want to strike back and to register their presence in an economy that will not give them any opening, in a society that will crush them at every opportunity. I hope that I’m able to convey the point that these scams are not just about ingenuity, which they are, and ambition, but also the number of places where they are arising from a sense of injustice and—

RAJAGOPALAN: And desperation, right?

POONAM: Yes. My husband is also an economist like you. When he read the whole thing the first time, he had a one-line commentary. He said, “In India, fraud seems to be becoming the individual’s default response when society fails.” I’ve written 100,000 words, but I think that it remains true across the stories.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think that’s right, especially because of the scale of it. Again, going back to the head of our conversation, if this was more about the individual, their ingenuity, and them wanting to be criminal masterminds, you would see this in far smaller numbers just off the bar. The fact that there are so many people who think they have to do this, or they want to do this because the alternative is worse and there’s nothing to lose, and they are desperate, and there’s really no other sensible opportunity left for them, just shows exactly what you said that Mihir [Sharma] was saying, which is, we’ve completely failed to provide economic opportunity for a very vast number of young people in India.

Women in the Scam Economy

The second part of it that I found striking is the women. I know you also talk about women when you shift the lens to China and the United States and the pig-slaughtering schemes and all that. We’ll get to that in a second. In India, the role of women I found quite interesting cutting across two, three different ways. Even in this world, they have very little agency. One, women are more likely to be victims of the scams themselves. Second, they are more likely to be the intended beneficiaries of a lot of new schemes. A lot of the new schemes are targeting women, like this life insurance scheme that is supposed to target widows, and especially young widows who’ve been struck by an untimely death, and all that stuff. 

But these women can’t negotiate the welfare state at all. Shrayana [Bhattacharya] has written about this; Yamini Aiyar has written about this. Multiple people have written about how negotiating whatever benefits you’re supposed to get through the state intermediaries is not a straightforward process. They get scammed almost in a new way. One, the system is setting them up to fail. Second, they are more likely to be victims of all these agents and things like that. Third, they’re also the ones who are least likely to have paperwork to start with, because women are not the ones who are always sent to school. Most women I know in these rural areas are not the ones who are finishing or studying up to the 10th standard to get the 10th standard pass certificate, and so on and so forth.

Then, of course, there’s this whole other layer of, they are more likely to get trafficked and put in certain indentured-servitude kind of scams where they’re calling people and scamming them out of money in some kind of pornographic calling scheme, or even just the lonely lover’s calling number scheme, and things like that. The women seem to be everywhere in your story, but they’re never the ones with agency who are controlling it. I would have loved to see the female mastermind in all of this. That would have given me some joy.

POONAM: There is, actually. There is, and I’ll come to that. In the case of Assam, we spoke about it. It was heartbreaking, first of all, to see how the women were often the living people . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: Who were erased.

POONAM: Who were erased. You can’t think of a worse thing to do to a living person. It begins there. Also, in a lot of these cases, women are, on the face of it, included as a collaborator, because that’s where I was hoping that the story would get interesting. Not in Aisha’s case, but in a different case of insurance scam, there’s a woman whose husband has died. It’s very clear that he was shown to be alive at the time of his death. Then the insurance scamsters bought a life insurance policy in his name with his wife as a beneficiary. It also became clear to Sadiq and me that she was in on it, that they told her that she would get some money off of it. Yet, the women—and not just in this case—they would just cheat the woman of what she was owed. Or if a man has died, and if you have taken out six insurance policies for him, and you’re expecting, I don’t know, like 20 lakh or 30 lakh for one dead man, the payout—the woman is only getting 1 lakh in all this.

The number of ways in which I kept thinking that even if the women were entering this economy, there was just no chance of fairness. I think the tables only turn when you make these scams truly digital. You remove, in some sense, a lot of our structural inequalities. In some sense, there are scams in which the women have an immediate advantage. Then again, if you think about a romance scam, in which already you have a skewed gender issue as a huge factor, and if you have a single woman who’s working to be a romance scammer, no one can stop her.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

POONAM: She can be whatever she wants. She can earn as much money as she wants, and so I have a character like that. God, she was brutal. She was very clear about what this meant in a societal way, because “he was trying to recruit me.” She would keep saying that bakra tha [he was a sucker], like he was a target. Why should we feel bad? Because we were women making our way through cities like Delhi and Gurgaon. You can hardly leave the house or walk down the street without feeling like you’re in real danger. A lot of them, yes, the women romance scammers saw that as a harmless prank but also enjoyed doing it from a clear sense of societal revenge, and I could not blame them.

RAJAGOPALAN: Honestly, when I was reading the book, there were very few people I wanted to blame. Maybe the pig-butchering scams, there is something really insidious going on there. But most of these people are still at a point where they’re eking out a living. No one here is like Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven, walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars having robbed a very rich man. It doesn’t seem like any of them are cartoonish villains of some sort, if you know what I mean. They all seem very human, very desperate, in terrible situations. Maybe the Brahmin brothers from Kumbakonam seem a little bit more like your typical villains, showering gold from helicopters in a Ponzi scheme. I love that, by the way. I love that. The helicopter part of the story really charmed me.

How Scammers Get Trapped Inside the System

POONAM: I don’t agree. I’ll butt in to say that I don’t agree. I think this is what happened. Let’s go back to the scamsters in Jamtara. They get in from a point of having, like I said, nothing to lose. You have no education, no job, these farms have already died out. No one’s even employing you on their farm. You’ve gone to the city, you’ve worked for a few months, you’ve come back, you’re just not saving enough money to have that as a sustainable option. Whatever the starting point is, it’s mostly nothing to lose.

This is a world in which, unlike when you have a job and you wait years for a promotion, two months can change your life. Within two months from having nothing to lose, you can have a solid, enviable bank balance. You can build a giant house with every luxurious fitting that you can think of. You can have an art deco balcony and tall gates and a playground for your children. You can send your children to English medium schools, and you and your wife can wear only designer clothes. All of this is possible. All of this happens very quickly.

I also saw what scams do to people who come from having nothing to lose. Their mindset starts to harden quite early on in the journey. That makes it harder and harder to go back. They realize just how much money there is to earn if they just stuck around, continue doing this, became more ambitious, involved more people. Finally, I have never met a scammer, at least in an Indian context, who ever lost the awareness of what happens when they come out. I met people who tried, who went to jail and then came out, and they just didn’t want to do it. There was—again, they could go back to nothingness. 

People sometimes would ask me, but they’ve already earned so much money, lakhs, crores of rupees—stuffing money, literally, like in a Bollywood sense, stuffing money in their mattresses. That’s what the police would find in these desperately poor villages in Santhal Pargana. That money comes and it goes. They invest in building these houses, they buy very luxurious things, and their wives are now running cooperatives that need funding. They have started these shops that need some financial support. Then they just find they can’t get out.

I did talk about there being less of a moral burden if there’s not some sobbing victim that they can see. I could see their attitudes hardening and their justifications becoming a little more cold-blooded. That broke my heart.

RAJAGOPALAN: Because of victims?

POONAM: Yes, it is devastating for the victims.

RAJAGOPALAN: I didn’t mean to suggest that I only feel for the criminals. Not at all. Of course, they are criminals.

POONAM: No, I know that you wouldn’t.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s totally wrong, just to be clear on it. But it seems like it is exactly what got them into these criminal situations is the same reason they can’t easily get out. They neither have the capacity, nor do they have the scaffolding where they can take all this easily earned capital and now invest it in the productive parts of the economy. That doesn’t exist. A deep productive economy doesn’t exist in that setup.

POONAM: The only thing I could think of was a scammer trying to then punt his political election campaign, because that’s one way to then hide it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Not exactly a productive economy either [chuckles]. No, but what I mean is if I imagine a scamster in, let’s say, Bombay—there used to be stories of these dance bar women. They managed to get quite a lot of money from their lovers, or bakras [scapegoats], or whichever way you want to characterize it. They had ways of using that money a little bit more productively. They would lend it to their neighbors. They would start some small enterprise. It could be like a Tupperware sharing enterprise. They had productive parts of the economy which could absorb their capital. Even though the capital was easy money or criminal money, there was some way for it to be deployed where they weren’t completely out of options, and they weren’t stuffing it in the mattresses or buying designer clothes, right?

POONAM: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think exactly the problem that you see in Jamtara, Deogarh, and all these places is, that’s the reason there was nothing productive happening. That’s why they got into this business in the first place. Once they made money, unless they leave that area, there is nothing productive to channel it to.

POONAM: Yes. Right, and so the only thing that they ever thought of in these places was politics. You understand political economy much better than I do. We want a more stable political economy sector in these places, but politics, like in fighting an election . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Basically, what they’re using the money for quite clearly is to move up the status ladder, either through a bigger house, through becoming important cooperatives or some small business owner in that society, becoming the local MLA or supporting the local MLA. That’s really what they’re negotiating because the only thing to be negotiated in these economies is that there’s no real productive deep economy. It’s heartbreaking.

POONAM: Yes. The houses were actually a very clever move. If someone hadn’t explained to me, it would never strike me. If the police raids you, they take away everything—all the mattresses and the money. The house still stands.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and the house is in your name, and it’s very hard to dispossess someone of a home.

POONAM: Yes. That’s why they went all out. Italian marble. Some of these villages had very fancy houseware stores, because the scamsters were buying the best mirrors, marbles, and remote-controlled curtains because the house will still be there. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Some physical capital, right? Which can’t easily be expropriated.

POONAM: The only thing other than politics was that in some—not in some cases, I think in most cases—when they had money, they sent their children to proper schools. As cynical as it sounds, I thought that maybe if we waited and saw where that could go for the next generation, if I returned to the story, I would like to follow the children. Maybe that then, is a real upliftment rather than this very brief spell of overnight money.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. The kids go to better schools, but it still seems to me like the children going to better schools are likely to have a better future only if they leave.

POONAM: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: There is a particular poverty trap that they’re all in. It’s no surprise this is happening in these awful places. Kumbakonam is the only place which is still part of a growth economy where something like this is happening. There, it’s quite clear that it’s not a phishing scam. It’s a Ponzi scheme, which is a very growth economy sort of scheme in the first place, right?

POONAM: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: There is a lot of capital. There are people making good money, and they want to get better returns than what the market is offering them. This is their way of doing that. It’s being negotiated, of course, through status, and buying people, and buying the locals, and whatever the elite structure is. That’s still a rich people, rich economy, and a productive economy scam. You have Ponzi scams in New York City. You will not get these kinds of scamsters—what’s happening in Assam—in New York City, if you know what I mean.

POONAM: Yes.

From Local Scams to Transnational Cybercrime

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s really unfortunate. I want to switch gears to the second part of your book, which was deeply related to the first, but was completely different. It was like “Oh, now we’ve suddenly left this world that I’m a little bit more familiar with,” into the world of Chinese apps and Chinese data mining and targeting, and also simultaneously just very sophisticated digital infrastructure which can then be routed both through the formal economy and the crypto economy, and make money for people just in order to defraud them at a later stage.

The nature of these scams felt quite different in the second half of your book. First, for those who are completely uninitiated, this was the first time I knew any of this, by the way. I wasn’t aware. I live in a very nice, happy world where people put their money in the S&P 500 index funds. I had no clue any of this was happening. I didn’t know that suburban housewives who live next to me in the United States are the ones who are being targeted. One, can you just walk us, like a CliffsNotes version for the completely uninitiated and who haven’t yet read the book because it’s just come out, what that world looks like? Then we can dive deeper into it.

POONAM: I’ll be happy to. Maybe it’s not so quick. The story that I follow in the book is, to my mind, it’s not set in any physical geography or doesn’t really portray any one country alone. That’s why sometimes you’ll think, “Oh, there’s India, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar.” Think of it this way. The one thing that I follow in the whole book, never losing sight of it, is the story of this vast scam force that we have built in India. Millions of people who, for a number of reasons that we’ve already talked about, there is this absolute economic collapse and there’s societal failure. I would take you back to thousands and thousands of years back to caste system, talk about empathy and the lack of it.

All of these factors have then created this very thriving, sophisticated, technically astute scam force that is willing to cross the line into the ethical grey zone. I mean to say, it won’t take that much convincing for them to cross over to the ethical grey line. Sometimes they won’t know what they’re getting into. Yes, just to come back. There’s the story of this scam force.

When you have so many people who have been failed by the job economy and various other things, they can be recruited by anyone trying to scam any part of the population anywhere. Whatever, you can just dream of a target base, put these people on it, and there you have a scam. Someone like that, someone in the scam force can be recruited by a scam center in Delhi that’s running these digital arrest scams, KYC scams, lottery scams, or the credit card scams, loan scams, and job scams. There’s anything. Every digital touch point, every time that you transact with someone is a way for them to weaponize it against you.

It can also be, once you have that, and once you throw in globalization with visas on arrival and cheap flights, and even the basic structures of outsourcing, you can then take this labor and put it to any kind of dark use. I’m not even getting into any other forms of dark use, but just the scams alone. It means that someone sitting in China can recruit these people in India and then give them a target base. That target base could also be people in India, so they scam each other, or the target base could be someone in Singapore or America.

Better even—so that everything runs more efficiently and these people can’t leave and don’t get too many ideas—it’s easier to then traffic them to locations where the foreigners who are in the scam can control them and tell them exactly what to do, give them timings, give them targets, give them scripts, and watch them day and night. That is simply what the story is.

Once you have that scam, then that is part two, where you might just show the progression from domestic scams to transnational scams. You have these Chinese companies coming in. At first, before COVID, they started actual offices all over your big cities, tech hubs in Gurgaon, Bangalore, and Mumbai. They would hire unemployed Indian people, and they would have them work for these scam apps. Whether they are romance apps or loan apps or betting apps, they were told to—the targets were people in India.

Once that story takes a darker turn, I look at the human trafficking element because that’s happening at a very organized scale. That’s where things become more organized. They become more anonymous. The stakes multiply in some sense. You have, at least, I could think of four levels of recruitment that gets people to these scam compounds in Southeast Asia. 

It could be someone in their community; there’s someone on Facebook or Telegram channels. I had to join all of these networks on Facebook and Telegram. There are these recruiters also sitting in these scam compounds in Southeast Asia who are completely anonymous, who just passed on the job. It keeps getting communicated further down the human trafficking chain. Once you arrive at these places, these scam compounds, there’s no getting out. Someone will take your passport, and then the torture begins. 

Scam Slavery in Southeast Asia

RAJAGOPALAN: Can you separate these two a little bit? You know, there’s that whole—the Gurgaon kind of recruiting almost has a call center feel to it. The way that a lot of young people were graduates with basic English-speaking skills; they were trained to be phone operators at these various call centers. These people are also trained. They’re given a script. They’re given very clear KPIs and deliverables: You have to target n number of people in a day. That kind of recruiting feels a little bit different because early, they may have not known what they’re getting into, but pretty soon they know they’re scamming someone. There are more options to quit or leave. I’m not saying it might be easy, but it’s easier.

How does that then transition into moving them to other countries in Southeast Asia, taking away their passport? That is almost like working off your debt servitude. There’s something else going on. There’s the promise of a great new job. Sometimes, they know they’re going to work in the scam economy, but most of the times they really don’t know they’re going to work in this kind of a scam economy. What are these two different recruiting mechanisms like? You’ve traced the story.

POONAM: The mechanism is the same. In all of these cases, even though the book deals with two cases, it begins with a fake job offer because when you’re looking at this scam workforce, most of them are just looking for a job because they don’t have a job. Someone gives them a job offer. In some cases, like for this guy who was in a village in Karnataka, he gets a job offer from a recruiter in his community, in his village. The recruiter has been passed down that job from someone from Telegram, and the person in Telegram got that job offer from someone in a scam center in Myanmar.

Anyway, coming back to connecting these two worlds, the hook is the same. There’s a job that doesn’t exist, but you’ve been offered a job. Now, in what I call the traditional Indian call center scams, which is where Dreamers entered, someone in  Delhi or Bombay or Chandigarh will see that job offer. Maybe they got it on Facebook, or they found it on an employment portal, or someone actually gave them a call and said, “I found your number somewhere, and why don’t you send me your CV?” Then they’ll receive a fake job offer. They’ll be given an address to come to begin their job, their employment.

Once they go there, they’ll be given a training, and they’ll be given a script. Very quickly, as you mentioned, it’ll be clear to them that their job is to take part in a scam. Some people will get freaked out and try to leave. Most people will just take that as something that at that time they think, “Maybe it’s for a few months, and then we’ll see where it goes.” Of course, some of them start to harden in a pattern that I described before, and they do leave, but to start their own scam centers.

That economy—and I don’t go into that economy in this new book; I only mentioned it in the introduction—it is massive. It is very well established, organized. There’s young people sitting in these call centers in Delhi, Bombay, Chandigarh, Asansol, Calcutta, making these actual phone calls, not text messages, to people mostly in the West, US, UK, America, Canada.

I am currently in the UK, and every other day, I get a call from someone saying they are calling from the HMRC, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. This person has a British accent, and he says that I have not paid HMRC my taxes for the last several years, and legal proceedings are going to start against me, and so I can press 1 and talk to someone. I know where it goes from here. I probably even know possibly that he or she is sitting in. And sometimes I’ll talk to—

RAJAGOPALAN: You covered this in Dreamers, right? Like Pawan Pujari and that whole story of there’s an actual scam. It’s just not happening in His Majesty’s Revenue Service, it was the IRS [Indian Revenue Service], but it’s kind of, that’s what’s going on.

POONAM: Yes, there’s IRS and there’s HMRC. I can sometimes have a conversation. I’ll be like, “Are you in Uttam Nagar or are you in Gurgaon?” Or something like that. They’re definitely not in the UK and they’re not from the HMRC. That system already exists, and that was my starting point into this shadow economy. 

Once you have that workforce, it could also be recruited by someone abroad in a really bizarre way because in a different context, you have people who are sitting in Delhi but scamming people in the UK, pretending to be in the UK. It’s the same people who can be recruited by someone in Myanmar and then trafficked to Myanmar, and there’s a similar kind of person. They will be scamming someone maybe in the UK, the US, Singapore, or Malaysia. 

It’s the same system. The story becomes much more dark because of the phenomenon now well documented of scam slavery, which is pretty much centered in Southeast Asia. It’s very organized. It’s mostly run by Chinese-origin cyber-scam cartels. Most of them are fugitives from Mainland China, and they have set up these elaborate operations at the level of whole cities.

One of the first journalists who went there very rightly described it as the Silicon Valley of cyber-scams. You have the whole city there designed to execute very sophisticated cryptocurrency investment, romance scams, and you’re targeting mostly wealthier parts of the world, but let’s say also places like Singapore. They’re not so restricted by geography. It’s just that they seem to have victims who can pay in millions of dollars.

RAJAGOPALAN: I am sure the nature of the scam is a little bit different. Again, criminality is criminality, and the victims are, of course, losing everything in all these different scams. I don’t want to make that distinction, but there does seem to be something a lot more insidious about, “I’m going to string this person along for two years. In those couple of years, I’m going to make sure they make money, because my way of gaining their trust is that they do see some financial return. When I have really seen their little pot of gold grow is when I take the rug off of their feet.”

There’s something very different and much more devastating about that than just the simple scams of someone called and they pretended to be a bank officer. That just still seems to be a low-level, single point of contract, not integrating themselves into your lives in some way. This feels different. Did it feel different to you when you were tracking this?

POONAM: Yes, it was terrifying from my first minute into the story, because the people that you’re dealing with, because when you have this—like I said, I keep going back to the scam force—that they can be recruited by anyone. The people on the other end of the line can be anyone. They can be like someone as seemingly harmless as an insurance scamster in Haryana or Assam, but it also can be a violent gangster in a part of the world . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: In Cambodia or Myanmar.

POONAM: In Cambodia or Myanmar, where you don’t know the language, you don’t know anyone, and you’re trapped. If you don’t scam someone, there can be starvation, there could be beatings, there could be death. Yet even though that very terrifying threat hovers over most of them, there are people within the system who are co-opted, who switch over, who at some point tell themselves that they’re going to do it willingly. I then saw those people rise.

’When I was reporting from India, it seemed very much like North India is doing much worse than South India, so you will see more scammers, the poorer parts, more disenfranchised parts like north and northeast, Jharkhand, yahaan pe hoga yeh sab system [you might have systems in your home country], wahan se toh sab jagah se log aate hain. Yes, people come from everywhere. They were from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. I used to be on the phone with so many of them. But also, of course, UP, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Once you’re there, you can only leave if someone pays the scam center the amount that they bought you for. 

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s indentured servitude, basically, clean and simple. You’ve got to pay and buy your freedom.

POONAM: Yes. Towards the end of the reporting cycle, I was already running into activists who were telling me that they were rescuing people from these centers, either by contacting the embassy or sometimes activists would raise money and pay the compound owners. Sometimes these scamsters were only getting out with the help of the activists, so they didn’t have to pay the servitude money, which in a lot of cases they didn’t have to begin with, so that they could join another center that paid them better and also gave them a little more freedom.

There were centers that allowed you to go out occasionally or even visit home, India or somewhere else because this was a system where you could also see how the same desperation and other structural issues that created the scam force in India was creating similar scam labor pools elsewhere. The people from Uganda, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bangladesh, the Philippines, everywhere along the poorer parts of the world.

Reporting on the Shadow Economy

RAJAGOPALAN: I’ve tracked your journalism long enough to know how you’ve made your way into some of these Indian stories. That’s literal field work. You get a phone call, you start chasing contacts, you go one after the other, you visit these places, you talk to them, you embed yourself in these Facebook networks. That feels quite similar in some sense to the kind of work that you did in Dreamers.

The Cambodian compound turn in the book feels very different. As an investigative journalist, how do you enter that world? One, it’s physically unsafe. You could potentially be a victim because you have a digital footprint and people could try to corner you in various ways. How do you navigate that world? Is it completely long distance? Are you able to go there? Do you have any layer of interaction with the higher-up mafia and the gang lord?

POONAM: I have been in scarier situations in our own great land. It’s not like . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but I’ve read about those scarier situations, so I know a lot more about them than the scarier situations in Cambodia, which I know a lot less about.

POONAM: I was much more scared in India meeting, say, the gau rakshaks or the cow vigilantes of Haryana, several years ago, and some of that showed up in Dreamers. I feared for my life, truly. That was seven years ago. I was much younger. This time, yes, it is scary. It’s the same method, Shruti. It’s no different. If I had the clarity that I was following the journey of these people—the scam force—and then wherever they go, whoever hires them, I have to go. That’s what took me to Southeast Asia. 

It feels more scary because the people who are running these scams are more scary. The whole structure is scarier, in that there is—some of these scam compounds have hired criminals, actual criminals, to guard these compounds. They’ve killed people for crossing them, for opposing them, for trying to escape from these compounds. They have threatened journalists. Like in India, these systems are supported by localized corruption going up to the levels of the prime minister. I could understand that if I got into trouble, it would be bad, very bad. It would be devastating, yes, very bad.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I didn’t mean it from “if you get into trouble” point of view because your entire business is getting into trouble in some sense, right? Right from Dreamers up to here. It’s like you’re going to places where if anyone figured out what you’re doing, they would not trust you with the story necessarily, or if they do tell you, there’s fear of exposure. You’re always in a precarious position where if they ever figure out you’re truly going to write this up or not protect their identity or anonymity, you could get into some very serious problems, physically devastating consequences.

The reason I’m asking the question about danger is not just the magnitude of danger, or that it’s a foreign country and you can navigate India better. But do your standard radars of what is safe and unsafe work the same way in Cambodia the way they might work in Jharkhand, which you are so familiar with? When you start pulling a thread and you start calling the next person and the next person and going for meetings, does that feel different in some sense?

POONAM: Beyond the language aspect, not so much. Even with language, I don’t know Assamese that well, and I don’t know Tamil at all. No, I actually don’t think so. If you’re going into a dangerous place as a journalist, then the structure within which you work is similar. You already, unfortunately, have activists who know much more about this world and are probably taking greater risks. 

Like with Assam or with other places, I did know who the activists were. I was in touch with them. They would advise me on where to go. In the case of Sihanoukville in Cambodia, an activist actually gave me the very own taxi in which she travels. I do take advantage of those larger structures. I had two phones with me because she told me that if I were to get kidnapped by one of these ganglords—if they found me snooping around—then they would just throw me in a room and take my phone. 

I had a different phone. Then you have all the numbers, the Indian Embassy and this Facebook group of these activist organizations. I don’t know what they were doing. I would then take out that phone from under my clothes and so on and so forth. Yes, there are activists. A lot of times, unless you’re dealing with terrorist organizations, a lot of times people don’t want to harm journalists. I have used that to my advantage. 

Yes, I know that I’m still taking a risk. No, it doesn’t feel different. In some sense, I think I know that if I’m in a country where I don’t understand the language or the culture, I will just take more precautions. In some sense, in this case, you’ll have seen in the story, I never got out of the car because I was told never to go into these compounds. If this was in India, I would have tried to find . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s the reason I got the sense of danger, because you can’t get out of the car to chase your story. It just feels already more ominous than the other chapters when one is reading them. Do you know what I mean?

POONAM: Yes. The other thing that has really helped my writing is to stop trying to be someone who’s finding out the truth or trying to tell the full and complete story. I’ve never really seen myself as an investigative journalist. A lot of times, I’m not even trying to be a journalist. For this book, I’m trying to be a scammer. I’m trying to profile someone who’s trying to scam me. It’s everything. Once I’m immersed in a world, I’m ready to do anything. Not illegal work; I’ve not scammed anyone. But if you remove that from the picture, you can get so much more. 

And I can see that you get—again, the whole thing of chasing the truth—because if you write any story deeply (I’m sure you have had that experience), you are investigating because if I was writing about a fashion show—and I have—I have investigated it. I have looked at every single participant in that fashion show, in a beauty pageant. I once wrote about a beauty pageant. To me, sure, that’s all it is.

RAJAGOPALAN: The book is also different, as you say. It’s not just investigating one story and getting to the absolute bottom of it. What you’re really doing is you’re connecting lots of different dots, which are not obvious to those of us on the outside that these are actually connected. In some sense, it’s really like the work of a political economist. It’s like patterns. You are tracing out the pattern, and you’re saying, “Oh, you see this pattern here, and then you see a slightly different one here.” It’s investigative in a very different kind of way, like a pattern prediction way, almost.

POONAM: Yes. My husband, Mihir [Sharma], he does not like to take any credit for it. I work closely with him in that. Once I’ve written something, he reads it as someone who thinks much more bigger-picture than sometimes I can. I’m so deep in a story, sometimes I can’t think beyond what’s . . . I’m overwhelmed a lot of times. He’ll then tell me what he sees, some of the larger patterns. Sometimes I’ll go back to the story when I’m rewriting it or when I’m editing it. I’m thinking, I’m trying to then do the larger work of connecting the dots rather than following certain threads. I’m really grateful to him because I think the number of times he’s read it, it’s unbelievable.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love Mihir. Hi, Mihir, if you’re listening. I love you. I love your work, but I’m not giving him any credit for this. The credit is entirely going to you, Snigdha. I think he’ll appreciate that too. 

One thing I was very charmed by is because you told me that when the Jamtara thing happened, the first thing they always say is, “Oh, someone from our area managed to scam Amitabh Bachchan.” This comes back to Amitabh Bachchan, even in your personal entry point, because you are getting KBC [Kaun Banega Crorepati] scam calls for this.

Starting the Story

RAJAGOPALAN: You’ve spoken with so many people and traced so many threads, it’s impossible to tell us exactly how you did this. If someone wants to write a book like this, how do they get into this in the first place? What made you keep talking to this KBC chap and then follow that part of the story? When is the phone call and a random thing that happens to you just a random thing, and when is it the next project, I guess?

POONAM: [laughs] The one thing that is the beginning of all stories that I write, whether it’s a magazine piece or a whole book, is immersion. I cannot work without that. It takes up a lot of my time, but that’s what I’ll advise anyone who wants to write a book like this, or a piece, or a story. Once you decide that you want to put yourself in a world, then really put yourself in it. Sometimes, even if it means that you forget to pay rent, then that happens. That’s fine. That’s the price that you will pay. That work, the immersion, it sounds romantic, but it’s actually quite technical.

For each of these stories, like when I’m chasing the KBC scammers—and you’ll have seen in the chapters, I’m following their every move. I’m following them minute by minute. I’m following every website that’s popping up. I’m going on YouTube every day, every other day, to find out who has posted a video, who has mentioned Rana Pratap, because that’s the alias that scammers use. I’m trying to go to the police station and actually do the legwork and then find out what they have found on KBC scams. For a different chapter, like coming all the way out to the pig butchers, I will . . .

RAJAGOPALAN: Can I stay with the KBC story for just one second? At what point did you offer yourself as an employee, set up a fake identity? I know that’s part of your immersive method, but when is the story just talking to a bunch of people doing background research, and when is it, “Oh, I really need to get into this and maybe deal with this as a fellow employee? It’s not a field visit anymore. Now I’m in it.”

POONAM: If you have devoted large parts of your career talking to bad guys, then at some point you do run into the limitation that they will only tell you so much as a journalist, and sometimes they will not talk to you at all. I’m not the only one who came up with this method. A lot of writers are trying to go deeper with people who do bad things, like criminal things, unethical things. They do sometimes—they have to enter the world as a participant. I have done this before, and again, like with the scammers, I said, I will say, “I will work with you.”

I also knew that this would work because I had already been following the story of Dreamers and the desperation for jobs and status and the whole like this. It was like I was trying to create a portrait of this generation that was driven by aspiration. I knew that if I told someone that it would work for them, they will take me in. If we go somewhere—and I’m still doing that, actually, like with the HMRC scammers, I talk to them sometimes because that’s the easiest way.

That can’t be the only way, obviously. You can be misled into a totally irrelevant rabbit hole. Then you have to also talk to scammers as a journalist and also talk to the police and talk to the victims and go to the court and see what happens and get copies of an FIR. They’re like, yes, that’s the margin. You take whatever entry you can get.

RAJAGOPALAN: Then the second part, sorry, I interrupted you when you were talking about Assam and Cambodia and what you did in those circumstances.

POONAM: Yes. I think I just spent so much time just living on these Telegram groups because Telegram is more anonymous in its messaging structure than even WhatsApp in some sense because you don’t even need to know the number. This whole recruiting for pig butchers across Southeast Asia was happening on Telegram. I would be on Telegram a lot. I think the amount of leads that I got from just joining that seemingly benign, banal group called Indians in Cambodia, Facebook group. Why would anyone join it if they were not Indians in Cambodia?

I joined it and god, how much it benefited me. I just posted one message there. I started to comment on people who were already saying—because it was a group for people asking other Indians, Indians asking other Indians, “Where can I find a kathak class?” or “Where can I find a cook to make me biryani?” Suddenly, it was getting flooded with messages saying, “My brother’s trapped in Cambodia,” or “Friends, do not accept a job in Cambodia if it says XYZ.”

I started messaging these people and that totally changed the course of the story for me, access-wise. That led me to the exact place that I—my destination in Cambodia. It gave me sources. Months before I even went to Cambodia, people already did talk to me because I spent that much time building sources, building trust over Facebook messages, Facebook calls.

I had a separate phone for this entire period of reporting and writing because that was my scam phone. Scammers would contact me. I would contact scammers. I would try to execute scams. The scammers would give me steps to execute, and I would go along and try to take someone’s money. Yes, I went all in.

RAJAGOPALAN: You scammed people?

POONAM: I’ve not scammed anyone.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, you just go up to that point and then don’t scam them. You see the script, you see the training, you get to peek into all of it, basically.

POONAM: Yes. I would—if they said, “I’m going to send you a list of—can you download this list from this app?” There are these apps where you could download a list of numbers that are active on WhatsApp in India. That seemed harmless. I would download that list, and I would tell them that I’ve downloaded it.

RAJAGOPALAN: These are basically lists being bought and sold of high-net-worth individuals [HNIs] or people who are targets and things like that, right?

POONAM: HNIs.

From Aspiration to Desperation

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, exactly. Last couple of questions. Again, I don’t mean to read too much into it, but it just feels like the aspiration economy story that you started with in Dreamers, now you show us what happens when that takes a dark turn. Is that a good way of thinking about Scamlands? I’m not saying all aspirations are going to end up with you scamming other people, but there seems to be something about the aspiration economy and that general point of view that, “Hey, anything to get ahead is now fair game.” There were not just hints; there was a big thread of that in Dreamers, and now this is just a really insidious version of it.

POONAM: Yes. It’s very much the same story going into a darker zone for me because with Dreamers, I was trying to follow people from different backgrounds. Everyone seemed to have had a clear-cut aspiration or dream they wanted to be, whether they wanted to be rich or famous or powerful. It was very clearly a thing that they seemed very different from how I thought of myself, even though I was only a few years older to them when I began reporting Dreamers.

I was working full-time as a journalist, and I would travel across India. I was talking to young people everywhere, and I was very curious how they thought of themselves, their lives, their prospects, because I was a young person coming from a small town. I had thought so much about myself and where I was in the world: how the world saw me, what I could do, my limitations, but also the benefits that I had coming as an outsider. The ways in which I could see others that others could not. I think that has defined all of my writing.

I was curious how the other young people in similar places saw themselves. This conversation kept coming back to the point of their aspirations, their dreams, and they would keep dragging me back to just talking about what they wanted to be. Even in the poorest villages, I would meet someone from the most disadvantaged section, and this guy would tell me, “I want to be the richest person in the world.” I kept hearing things like this.

As I started following some of them, I identified some of them; I started following them. Towards the end and beyond the period of after the book’s release, it seemed to me, it became quite obvious that only some of them had succeeded. I’m not talking about the people who are in the book, but the larger set of people that I followed. For the people that succeeded, I could see that they already had something. They were from a Baniya background, so they had caste privilege, or they had family connections, they had some backing.

For the others, I could just see them drifting, and they would remain in touch with me. I started to think that—I thought of them, I framed them as a totally different generation that was defined by and driven by aspiration. They had seemed to think that just because they had these aspirations, that they were willing to put in whatever it took, that they thought that those structural barriers would dissolve. Just because they wanted to, they were not going to dissolve. They did not dissolve.

I started thinking in this way much after Dreamers was published because some of the people that I’d followed, including someone—a major character from the book—I could see them make moral compromises to get where they wanted to be. One of the characters in the book wanted to be into politics. I could see her leave her idealistic political setting and switch over to a scenario where she could actually win an election ticket because she’s a woman. For all of her striving, no one was giving her a ticket.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is Richa Singh?

POONAM: Yes. None of the progressive parties were letting her career proceed. In other stories, too, I could see people make moral compromises. The most terrifying thread was, I watched people who just desperately wanted a job more than anything else. The frequency at which they were ending up in these scam networks, whether those scam networks were in their own villages and towns, or they had to come to Delhi and then try to find a legitimate job and fail at that and then find their way into a scam center in Delhi or Noida or Gurgaon. It just stayed.

Once I was in, also the digital infrastructure in India around 2016, 2017, was growing so rapidly. With every new digital touch point, there was a way for someone to start a scam and to weaponize those people who are using them. It seemed natural to see where it can go, how many people can be drawn in, how vast it is. What happens to these people and to society?

Closing Reflections

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is so tragic, right? That’s the part of it. You’ve invested in these people’s lives in some sense. You’ve known them, you’ve tracked them, you’re still in touch with them. It’s just heartbreaking that none of it goes anywhere. Even though to me, Dreamers was just a happier book. Somehow, it just felt more positive, like, “Oh, something could come off of it,” though the stories were all different kinds of stories. Scamlands just feels devastating by the end of it.

POONAM: Dreamers could have been darker. I was a younger, more naive person. Even when I saw a structural inequality, I told myself it could be breached, it could be overcome. I believed in aspiration because I was one of them. I thought of myself as one of them, although I had vast amounts of more privilege. I had changed. I changed a lot between Dreamers and Scamlands. India changed a lot when I was—

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and writing this book will change you, I think, somehow, right?

POONAM: More than writing this book, I think those years between when the book came out, 2018, when Dreamers came out, and now 2025—I don’t want to go into what the country has become or what things break my heart. But yes, Scamlands is darker for a reason, and it’s not just because of the scammers.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, and you’re right. Between Jio taking off and UPI taking off and COVID shutting everything down and moving us—hastening that digital transition more and more without building the necessary capability—it’s almost like the script is written for something terrible to unfold at the end of it. Even if things were really good in India, there are these other things that have happened in the rest of the world which make some of this almost inevitable. Thank you so much for writing this. This was so much fun chatting, and thank you for coming and talking to me. I’m so excited. What’s the next book?

POONAM: God, I have no idea, but I want to write something that’s not set in India. We’ll see how it goes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Okay. My vote is belly dancing. That’s what I would want your next book to be on. Or dancing more generally. Why not, right? Art, culture. You write beautifully about art. This should be fun.

POONAM: I want to write about it at some point. When I have time, I would rather dance and write about it because when I have time to write, I already have so many assignments and books, and my agent wants to know what I’m writing next. I think what I would like to give to the world, dance-wise, is I want to start more teaching. I already teach a little bit in the community, but I think that is more needed than another book.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I’d love to read the next book and even happier, if it’s about art, culture, and other things. I’d read everything you write. This was a joy. This is a real page-turner for those who are listening. I feel like everyone should read the book.

POONAM: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s been great talking to you. I should have made you talk more, so we’ll have to return to this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Not at all.

POONAM: I think you will have so many thoughts on the book that your listeners have not figured out.

RAJAGOPALAN: Nothing that you haven’t covered in the book, really. I would urge everyone still to read the book. The book is really great. The nice thing is there are very few big judgments made. It leaves things open-ended. There are so many ways your mind goes. People who are approaching it from different lenses can go different places. I very quickly skimmed Dreamers last night because I was like, I can’t remember any of these people and their names. Like WittyFeed.

The most obvious things jumped, and they were sailing in my head. I was like, “Okay, I really need to skim this very quickly.” My husband, I sent him on a wild goose chase all over the house. We have books in multiple different floors in multiple different rooms. I was like, “You got to find Dreamers for me. It’s somewhere in this house.” The poor man found the book.

POONAM: You and I, putting our husbands to work. [chuckles]

RAJAGOPALAN: He found the book, and apparently, I gave him the completely wrong description. Whatever I thought was the color of the cover, he said everything except the name of the author in the book is incorrect. The poor man has chased and chased and found the book. I quickly skimmed it again. It still holds up really well. For me as an economist—you said you want to know my thoughts. We usually think about employment, unemployment, underemployment. We get these aggregate statistics, which is very useful for the core job that I do, but it doesn’t tell us who these people are and what they actually end up doing.

I think for me, that was the biggest awakening with Dreamers. A pocket of your brain just opens up. It’s like, “Oh, these guys are just hanging out at the chai shop.” There’s a whole other thing going on when there is this kind of—and now with scammers even more so. That’s the core thought, but thank you for doing this. This was so much fun.

POONAM: Thank you. I had fun.