Scamming became the new farmingâ: inside Indiaâs cybercrime villages
On the surface, the town of Jamtara appeared no different from neighbouring districts. But, if you knew where to look, there were startling differences. In the middle of spartan villages were houses of imposing size and unusual opulence. Millions of Indians knew why this was. They knew, to their cost, where Jamtara was. To them, it was no longer a place; it was a verb. You lived in fear of being âJamtara-edâ.
Over the past 15 years, parts of this sleepy district in the eastern state of Jharkhand had grown fabulously wealthy. This extraordinary feat of rural development was powered by young men who, armed with little more than mobile phones, had mastered the art of siphoning money from strangersâ bank accounts. The sums they pilfered were so staggering that, at times, their schemes resembled bank heists more than mere acts of financial fraud.
In a short period, scam calls became an almost universal experience in India. With every innovation in Indiaâs digital marketplace â smartphones, digital wallets, e-commerce, crypto â Jamtaraâs scams expanded their target area. In New Delhi, Indiaâs policymakers boasted about âDigital Indiaâ and the spread of modern telecom infrastructure. But, for the majority of Indian citizens, the digital revolution became synonymous with Jamtara scams. Netflix even made a TV series about the district, with the tag line âSabka Number Aayegaâ. You could read that as âeveryone will get a callâ or as âyour number will be upâ. Jamtaraâs scammers took immense pride in duping the rich and famous. Conning a film star or a parliamentarian wasnât just about financial gain; it was a triumph that elevated their own standing.
From 2015 onwards, police from various states descended on the district. Arrests became common â but bail was easy to secure. Cases took ages to close, and conviction rates werenât high enough to stem the flood of scams. A few weeks before flying to Jharkhand to report on this phenomenon, I visited Delhiâs state-of-the-art cybercrime police station. The deputy superintendent showed me a video on his phone that captured the unapologetic opulence of a scammerâs house: a vividly painted bungalow with sprawling balconies and art deco styling, each section a splash of nursery-bright colours, of strawberry pink and pistachio green. His disbelief was evident in the breathless commentary that accompanied the video.
I wanted to understand how an obscure district in a neglected state became Indiaâs byword for digital deceit. Initially, I thought this would be a story about the dark promise of technology and the lure of easy money. But over weeks of reporting, what emerged was a portrait of two Indias colliding â one chasing material progress, the other bent on survival. And in their collision was born the kind of ambition that can drive those with nothing to lose into criminality, while entrenched inequalities make it impossible for them to turn back.
âThe numbers donât dial themselves,â Jitu* wanted me to know. We were sitting in my borrowed car at the edge of a dusty road in his village, about 50 miles from Jamtara. It was a sweltering day in May, the hottest month, and Jitu was wearing a peach-coloured T-shirt, shorts and well-worn slippers. His face was nearly round, with soft features and gleaming eyes. He looked friendly and smiled effortlessly. He didnât look like a seasoned grifter minting money from Indiaâs most notorious scam.
Jitu was, nevertheless, the âchief scammerâ of the village â a title he wore with pride. Naturally, he said, that meant he was kept busy all day. But out of respect for my guide, a local reporter, he would answer a few questions. Respect, it turned out â how it was given, whether it could undermine age-old hierarchies, whether it could be turned into power or money â was central to how the Jamtara scammers operated.
In 2012, Jitu had been in school when some older boys who had transferred in from Jamtara âsaw somethingâ in him. They showed him how to generate potential targets for scams. Jitu was singled out because he already had the respect of his peers. Unlike most others in school, his father ran a small business. His family identified as Dalits, historically disadvantaged in India, and werenât middle class in any recognisable way â but he paid his own school fees and always had a bit of pocket money. This meant he was cool enough to hang out with boys much older than him, who gave him the respect due to someone who was good at sports and had money for ice-cream.
The turning point in Jituâs life, however â as with everyone in his generation â came when his father bought him a phone. It was an early, no-frills Samsung handset, but Jitu, who was 15, took it to school the very next day. In this remote part of Jharkhand, known as Santhal Pargana, whose six districts include Deoghar and Jamtara, sweeping changes are rare. When they come, the impact is earth-shattering. If you ask someone in Delhi or Mumbai, they will tell you the moment that India set itself on a new course was 1991, when it liberalised its economy and foreign capital poured in. But people in rural Jharkhand and places like it across India will insist that the transformative moment came more than a decade later, when mobile phone towers popped up across the country.
âAt the end of 2012, we heard for the first time of a young man in the village being picked up in a case of cybercrime,â Murari Lal, a local social worker, told me. âWe couldnât understand what was going on. The police were saying,
ATM se paisa marta hai. [âHe steals money from ATMs.â] But we wondered what stealing money had to do with mobile phones.â
Aman named Sitaram Mandal could have explained. Nearly everyone I met in Santhal Pargana had something to say about him. Their accounts, along with extensive media coverage of his career, offered glimpses into his remarkable journey. If anyone created Jamtaraâs signature 21st-century industry, it was him.
In 2011, after leaving school in his small Jamtara village, Mandal boarded a train to Mumbai. Over the next five years, Mandal worked at a roadside eatery, a railway station retailer and finally a shop where people bought top-ups for their mobile phones. It was that last job where he learned the particular skill that made his fortune: clearing strangersâ bank accounts using a mobile phone. The thing that pulled him in immediately was that he did not have to break into the victimâs phone or their bank account. They gave you access willingly; you only had to lie.
Mandal, in his stint at the mobile recharge shop, found himself learning the manipulative tactics used by fraudsters to extract confidential information from unsuspecting individuals. But he couldnât do it alone. So, he found himself making the return journey to his birthplace, training several youngsters in his social circle, and building an army of âATM thievesâ, as they were called then. ATMs were as new to rural India as mobile telephony; the dark side of the digital revolution arrived as swiftly as its benefits. The easier it was to access your bank account, the easier it was to scam you out of it.
Mandalâs method began, of course, with a phone call. The voice on the line would be tinged with urgency; it was the bank calling, they would say and issue a dire warning: there was a problem with the targetâs bank account. To those unaccustomed to modern banking and increasingly complex know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, this was all too believable. âYour ATM card is about to become inactive,â they would then declare, dialling up the sense of urgency.
Under the guise of verifying the victimâs identity, they asked a stream of questions, such as the personâs date of birth and address. By the end, they had harvested every detail they needed: card numbers, pins, three-digit CVV number. Simultaneously, an accomplice would be navigating the victimâs bank account online, armed with the freshly gleaned information. To finalise the illicit transfer of funds to their account, they required one last piece of the puzzle: a one-time password (OTP) sent by the bank to the victimâs phone via SMS. âTo complete the KYC process, you must read out the six-digit code sent to your mobile number,â they instructed with authoritative calm. Overwhelmed by anxiety by this point, the victim recited the six digits as if they were items on a grocery list. With this, the fraudulent bank transfer was executed to perfection.
Following Mandalâs example, Jitu trained many of his friends and acquaintances, effectively passing on the techniques throughout his community. âThat scheme changed the lives of so many people,â he said, closing his eyes as if to relive the glory days of a decade earlier. But the scam had its limitations. The victim needed to be using an ATM card; he needed to be ignorant as well as trusting; he needed to have money in his bank account and a high daily transaction limit. That wasnât always the case. Fortunately, after a brief lull, new possibilities arose.
âIn 2014, the BJP won the elections, and Narendra Modi became the prime minister.â Jitu was smiling now, and not without reason. Full of reformist energy, the PM launched a bold mission to digitalise Indiaâs economy. âMobile apps began to be developed. They were meant to make life easier for the kind of people who had voted for him then. Professionals. Businessmen. People in the cities. People like you,â Jitu continued his lecture. âSuddenly, there was much more than just ATM cards: banking apps, digital wallets, instant lending.â
Many of the comfortably well-off Indians I knew who voted for the BJP in 2014 hoped for an economic miracle that would free India, once and for all, from its moribund, statist past. Modi, positioning himself as a dynamic face of market-oriented leadership, was the answer for a burgeoning middle class that credited their upward mobility to individual effort â they called it âmeritâ. They disdained the old socialist-leaning elite, and in Modi, a man of humble origins, they saw a reflection of themselves. Curtly, they dismissed the continuing importance of the centuries-old systems that built and maintained privilege in India and that facilitated their own access to education, capital and other resources. Any mention of caste produced a fit of anger. Every man for himself became the implicit motto for the Modi era.
When Modiâs tenure as prime minister began, life in the villages began to change to some extent. Many people in and around Kherbari, a village about 70 miles north of Jamtara, were grateful to him for welfare schemes that helped them build concrete houses, acquire gas cylinders and collect free food grains. Most of them expected nothing more from the government; little, if anything, was granted beyond the fundamental provisions. For those with loftier life goals, the mobile was the miracle, not Modi.
Between them, Jitu and his friends were phoning hundreds of people every day. If the target accepted the call, the scammer could choose from various options:
I am calling from your bank.
I am calling from your credit card company.
I am calling from your digital wallet startup.
I am calling from your mobile service provider.
The scammersâ friends and family didnât see them as cyberthieves. They regarded them as a league of highly skilled workers. Over the next few years, âchorâ, or thief, was gradually dropped from their title. The villagers who spoke to me only used the word âcyberâ to refer to the scammers. It conveyed the message without emphasising the criminality.
This semantic shift mirrored the broader acceptance of scamming as a profession. More and more people transitioned from traditional but less profitable occupations like agriculture and manual labour to the more lucrative and less effortful domain of mobile phone scams. âScamming,â Murari Lal, the social worker, told me, âbecame the new farming. The fathers try a different crop every season; the sons, a different con.â
One day Jitu showed me how one of his scams worked. Sitting in the front seat of the car, he methodically arranged two mobile phones on his lap. On one, he launched a gambling app that simulated a traditional three-card game. To play, you needed to transfer some cash to your game account, and you were allowed to ping someone elseâs digital wallet to ask for a top-up. This meant that you could use the game to ping random wallets attached to random phone numbers to ask for cash.
To demonstrate, Jitu pinged his digital wallet on the other phone from his game screen on the first. The second phone popped up a notification that someone was asking for 4,999 rupees (ÂŁ42).
That, he said, was where his game began.
How did an obscure district in a neglected state become Indiaâs byword for digital deceit?
By
Snigdha Poonam
Thu 30 Oct 2025 05.00 GMT
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On the surface, the town of Jamtara appeared no different from neighbouring districts. But, if you knew where to look, there were startling differences. In the middle of spartan villages were houses of imposing size and unusual opulence. Millions of Indians knew why this was. They knew, to their cost, where Jamtara was. To them, it was no longer a place; it was a verb. You lived in fear of being âJamtara-edâ.
Over the past 15 years, parts of this sleepy district in the eastern state of Jharkhand had grown fabulously wealthy. This extraordinary feat of rural development was powered by young men who, armed with little more than mobile phones, had mastered the art of siphoning money from strangersâ bank accounts. The sums they pilfered were so staggering that, at times, their schemes resembled bank heists more than mere acts of financial fraud.
âScamming became the new farmingâ: inside Indiaâs cybercrime villages â podcast
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In a short period, scam calls became an almost universal experience in India. With every innovation in Indiaâs digital marketplace â smartphones, digital wallets, e-commerce, crypto â Jamtaraâs scams expanded their target area. In New Delhi, Indiaâs policymakers boasted about âDigital Indiaâ and the spread of modern telecom infrastructure. But, for the majority of Indian citizens, the digital revolution became synonymous with Jamtara scams. Netflix even made a TV series about the district, with the tag line âSabka Number Aayegaâ. You could read that as âeveryone will get a callâ or as âyour number will be upâ. Jamtaraâs scammers took immense pride in duping the rich and famous. Conning a film star or a parliamentarian wasnât just about financial gain; it was a triumph that elevated their own standing.
From 2015 onwards, police from various states descended on the district. Arrests became common â but bail was easy to secure. Cases took ages to close, and conviction rates werenât high enough to stem the flood of scams. A few weeks before flying to Jharkhand to report on this phenomenon, I visited Delhiâs state-of-the-art cybercrime police station. The deputy superintendent showed me a video on his phone that captured the unapologetic opulence of a scammerâs house: a vividly painted bungalow with sprawling balconies and art deco styling, each section a splash of nursery-bright colours, of strawberry pink and pistachio green. His disbelief was evident in the breathless commentary that accompanied the video.
I wanted to understand how an obscure district in a neglected state became Indiaâs byword for digital deceit. Initially, I thought this would be a story about the dark promise of technology and the lure of easy money. But over weeks of reporting, what emerged was a portrait of two Indias colliding â one chasing material progress, the other bent on survival. And in their collision was born the kind of ambition that can drive those with nothing to lose into criminality, while entrenched inequalities make it impossible for them to turn back.
âThe numbers donât dial themselves,â Jitu* wanted me to know. We were sitting in my borrowed car at the edge of a dusty road in his village, about 50 miles from Jamtara. It was a sweltering day in May, the hottest month, and Jitu was wearing a peach-coloured T-shirt, shorts and well-worn slippers. His face was nearly round, with soft features and gleaming eyes. He looked friendly and smiled effortlessly. He didnât look like a seasoned grifter minting money from Indiaâs most notorious scam.
Jitu was, nevertheless, the âchief scammerâ of the village â a title he wore with pride. Naturally, he said, that meant he was kept busy all day. But out of respect for my guide, a local reporter, he would answer a few questions. Respect, it turned out â how it was given, whether it could undermine age-old hierarchies, whether it could be turned into power or money â was central to how the Jamtara scammers operated.
In 2012, Jitu had been in school when some older boys who had transferred in from Jamtara âsaw somethingâ in him. They showed him how to generate potential targets for scams. Jitu was singled out because he already had the respect of his peers. Unlike most others in school, his father ran a small business. His family identified as Dalits, historically disadvantaged in India, and werenât middle class in any recognisable way â but he paid his own school fees and always had a bit of pocket money. This meant he was cool enough to hang out with boys much older than him, who gave him the respect due to someone who was good at sports and had money for ice-cream.
The turning point in Jituâs life, however â as with everyone in his generation â came when his father bought him a phone. It was an early, no-frills Samsung handset, but Jitu, who was 15, took it to school the very next day. In this remote part of Jharkhand, known as Santhal Pargana, whose six districts include Deoghar and Jamtara, sweeping changes are rare. When they come, the impact is earth-shattering. If you ask someone in Delhi or Mumbai, they will tell you the moment that India set itself on a new course was 1991, when it liberalised its economy and foreign capital poured in. But people in rural Jharkhand and places like it across India will insist that the transformative moment came more than a decade later, when mobile phone towers popped up across the country.
âAt the end of 2012, we heard for the first time of a young man in the village being picked up in a case of cybercrime,â Murari Lal, a local social worker, told me. âWe couldnât understand what was going on. The police were saying,
ATM se paisa marta hai. [âHe steals money from ATMs.â] But we wondered what stealing money had to do with mobile phones.â
Aman named Sitaram Mandal could have explained. Nearly everyone I met in Santhal Pargana had something to say about him. Their accounts, along with extensive media coverage of his career, offered glimpses into his remarkable journey. If anyone created Jamtaraâs signature 21st-century industry, it was him.
In 2011, after leaving school in his small Jamtara village, Mandal boarded a train to Mumbai. Over the next five years, Mandal worked at a roadside eatery, a railway station retailer and finally a shop where people bought top-ups for their mobile phones. It was that last job where he learned the particular skill that made his fortune: clearing strangersâ bank accounts using a mobile phone. The thing that pulled him in immediately was that he did not have to break into the victimâs phone or their bank account. They gave you access willingly; you only had to lie.
Mandal, in his stint at the mobile recharge shop, found himself learning the manipulative tactics used by fraudsters to extract confidential information from unsuspecting individuals. But he couldnât do it alone. So, he found himself making the return journey to his birthplace, training several youngsters in his social circle, and building an army of âATM thievesâ, as they were called then. ATMs were as new to rural India as mobile telephony; the dark side of the digital revolution arrived as swiftly as its benefits. The easier it was to access your bank account, the easier it was to scam you out of it.
View image in fullscreen
A scene from the Netflix show Jamtara: Sabka Number Ayega. Photograph: Netflix
Mandalâs method began, of course, with a phone call. The voice on the line would be tinged with urgency; it was the bank calling, they would say and issue a dire warning: there was a problem with the targetâs bank account. To those unaccustomed to modern banking and increasingly complex know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, this was all too believable. âYour ATM card is about to become inactive,â they would then declare, dialling up the sense of urgency.
Under the guise of verifying the victimâs identity, they asked a stream of questions, such as the personâs date of birth and address. By the end, they had harvested every detail they needed: card numbers, pins, three-digit CVV number. Simultaneously, an accomplice would be navigating the victimâs bank account online, armed with the freshly gleaned information. To finalise the illicit transfer of funds to their account, they required one last piece of the puzzle: a one-time password (OTP) sent by the bank to the victimâs phone via SMS. âTo complete the KYC process, you must read out the six-digit code sent to your mobile number,â they instructed with authoritative calm. Overwhelmed by anxiety by this point, the victim recited the six digits as if they were items on a grocery list. With this, the fraudulent bank transfer was executed to perfection.
Following Mandalâs example, Jitu trained many of his friends and acquaintances, effectively passing on the techniques throughout his community. âThat scheme changed the lives of so many people,â he said, closing his eyes as if to relive the glory days of a decade earlier. But the scam had its limitations. The victim needed to be using an ATM card; he needed to be ignorant as well as trusting; he needed to have money in his bank account and a high daily transaction limit. That wasnât always the case. Fortunately, after a brief lull, new possibilities arose.
âIn 2014, the BJP won the elections, and Narendra Modi became the prime minister.â Jitu was smiling now, and not without reason. Full of reformist energy, the PM launched a bold mission to digitalise Indiaâs economy. âMobile apps began to be developed. They were meant to make life easier for the kind of people who had voted for him then. Professionals. Businessmen. People in the cities. People like you,â Jitu continued his lecture. âSuddenly, there was much more than just ATM cards: banking apps, digital wallets, instant lending.â
Many of the comfortably well-off Indians I knew who voted for the BJP in 2014 hoped for an economic miracle that would free India, once and for all, from its moribund, statist past. Modi, positioning himself as a dynamic face of market-oriented leadership, was the answer for a burgeoning middle class that credited their upward mobility to individual effort â they called it âmeritâ. They disdained the old socialist-leaning elite, and in Modi, a man of humble origins, they saw a reflection of themselves. Curtly, they dismissed the continuing importance of the centuries-old systems that built and maintained privilege in India and that facilitated their own access to education, capital and other resources. Any mention of caste produced a fit of anger. Every man for himself became the implicit motto for the Modi era.
When Modiâs tenure as prime minister began, life in the villages began to change to some extent. Many people in and around Kherbari, a village about 70 miles north of Jamtara, were grateful to him for welfare schemes that helped them build concrete houses, acquire gas cylinders and collect free food grains. Most of them expected nothing more from the government; little, if anything, was granted beyond the fundamental provisions. For those with loftier life goals, the mobile was the miracle, not Modi.
Between them, Jitu and his friends were phoning hundreds of people every day. If the target accepted the call, the scammer could choose from various options:
View image in fullscreen
Jamtara railway station, November 2022. Photograph: cameranest/Shutterstock
I am calling from your bank.
I am calling from your credit card company.
I am calling from your digital wallet startup.
I am calling from your mobile service provider.
The scammersâ friends and family didnât see them as cyberthieves. They regarded them as a league of highly skilled workers. Over the next few years, âchorâ, or thief, was gradually dropped from their title. The villagers who spoke to me only used the word âcyberâ to refer to the scammers. It conveyed the message without emphasising the criminality.
This semantic shift mirrored the broader acceptance of scamming as a profession. More and more people transitioned from traditional but less profitable occupations like agriculture and manual labour to the more lucrative and less effortful domain of mobile phone scams. âScamming,â Murari Lal, the social worker, told me, âbecame the new farming. The fathers try a different crop every season; the sons, a different con.â
One day Jitu showed me how one of his scams worked. Sitting in the front seat of the car, he methodically arranged two mobile phones on his lap. On one, he launched a gambling app that simulated a traditional three-card game. To play, you needed to transfer some cash to your game account, and you were allowed to ping someone elseâs digital wallet to ask for a top-up. This meant that you could use the game to ping random wallets attached to random phone numbers to ask for cash.
To demonstrate, Jitu pinged his digital wallet on the other phone from his game screen on the first. The second phone popped up a notification that someone was asking for 4,999 rupees (ÂŁ42).
That, he said, was where his game began.
This is how the conversation would run when he rang the person who received the top-up request: âSir, you have received a notification for a 4,999 rupee cashback from your mobile wallet company. Itâs something we are doing, keeping in view the hardships faced by our users in the pandemic. If you open the app now, you will see the amount 4,999 rupees flashing on the home screen. Below that, you will see two options: âdenyâ or âproceedâ. To claim the amount, you must press âproceedâ.â
This was the point at which Jitu would hope that the victim, through oversight or distraction, would mistakenly authorise a transfer away from his own wallet, instead of to it, without fully understanding the context.
âYou have done that successfully. The next page will ask you to enter the one-time password sent by your bank to facilitate the transfer of this amount to your account. Did you do that?â
Another point at which the victim could back out.
Sometimes they did. Often enough they didnât. Or the cyber-chor could walk away with the 4,999 rupees. But Jitu wouldnât, of course. Why would he?
âSir! I am very sorry; I have made a huge mistake. You must have received another SMS from your bank saying 4,999 rupees has been deducted from your account. Itâs all my fault â I pressed the wrong button at my end. Sir, please donât raise a complaint. I will get into trouble. The company will fire me right away. I will have to sleep on the street. My family will starve.â
âGive me a chance to fix this blunder. I will send you a refund plus the original cashback. I am initiating this process. On your homepage, you will see a new amount, 9,999 rupees. Below you will see two options: âdenyâ or âproceedâ. To claim the money, you must press âproceedâ.â
This charade would continue until the victim realised he had been repeatedly scammed, Jitu told me, casually placing the two tools of his trade back on the carâs dashboard. Leaning back in his seat, he emphasised the importance of spontaneity. âYou must come up with a number while being on the call. It could be 2,458 or 6,978. Thatâs the amount you tell them they have won â as a discount, a cashback, a surprise gift.â He emphasised that hesitations are fatal. âI choose to stick to the same number: 4,999.â
The other trick is to sound completely fearless. âI request them to call up the bank and ask to speak to me. I urge them to record the phone call. I say to them: âIf you have any doubts about my credentials, go to the police with the recording.â Thatâs usually all it takes to kill any suspicions.â
While revealing his methods, Jitu was neither sheepish nor boastful. He seemed to take just as much pride in swiftly dispatching his task as a competent individual in any sector. I asked him if he ever felt guilty cheating gullible strangers out of what could well be their hard-earned money. He answered promptly that there were infinite ways in which a cyberthief paid for his bad deeds. âHe doesnât have a moment of peace, for one. Even as I am conducting a scam call, I am thinking of where I will throw the sim card, and where I will hide the cell phone.â Perpetual anxiety was his punishment.
The village pond was visible from the carâs window. Jitu pointed in that direction and said that, in the end, that was where most of his scam phones wound up. The scammers exploit the natural landscape at every step, making calls from secluded, overgrown fields, burying their mobile phones in trenches beside streams and retreating up the hills during police raids.
This protective geography is also what kept this part of India poor. A short walk from Jituâs village, the Rajmahal Hills â a mountain range that spans an area about 1,000 sq miles and is older than the Himalayas â begin. Dark forests grow around rugged rocks and water rushes everywhere: even 20 years ago, venturing into these villages wasnât as straightforward as it is today. Back then, to access them, one would have needed to hire a boat on a day when dark clouds werenât looming on the horizon.
Since the turn of the millennium, this isolation has changed somewhat. Eighteen roads have been built, and the community pooled money to build another school. But official statistics for the region make for difficult reading. More than half of its 10.8 million people live below the poverty line, and 35% are âextremely poorâ. Thatâs comparable to the most isolated parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Dalits like Jitu, who make up 11% of the population, are disproportionately deprived.
The next day, I went to the cybercrime police station in Deoghar, where a press conference was scheduled to take place. A pack of reporters (all men) and I trooped into the British-era estate, with its high-ceilinged rooms arranged around a central courtyard. In the courtyard, the constables had lined up 15 men who were to be paraded in front of the reporters. The men had clearly been picked up in the dead of night, for most of them wore pyjamas, shorts and sleeveless vests. The constables fussed over them with the meticulous care typically reserved for fashion models prepping for a runway â arranging them according to height and straightening their postures.
In an orderly procession, they were led to the office of the superintendent. There, they were rearranged in two rows behind the senior officerâs desk. Two rows of mobile phones were placed on the table in the same formation as the men standing in the back. The event commenced with the superintendent coughing into the mic. He proceeded to read a press release: âBased on a secret tip, simultaneous raids were conducted in various villages, and 14 people wanted in cybercrime cases have been arrested,â he began. âThese cybercriminals used to pose as customer care executives and service providers to obtain sensitive information from the people âŚâ
He then read out their names. All suspects had the same surname, one that is common among some of the local Dalit communities.
The policeman was from an upper caste, so I was sceptical when he told me that their inquiries often lead them to the homes and hideouts of three specific communities: Dalits, Muslims and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), a collective term the government of India uses to classify hundreds of marginalised castes.
Jitu, however, confirmed to me that caste and community affiliations really do anchor the regional fraud networks. âIt starts at the training stage itself,â he explained over the phone one day. Since assuming the title of âmastermindâ, he said he has primarily trained young Dalit men in and around his village, who live close to each other and at a safe distance from the violence and intimidation they would face in upper-caste districts. In the villages where Muslims outnumbered Dalits and OBCs, the mastermind was likely to be one among them.
When I asked my reporter guide, a Brahmin, if upper-caste Hindus were in fact under-represented in this most profitable of vocations, he took me to his own village, home to more than 200 families. As we drove down the main street, he showed me the sturdy homes in which the upper-caste elite lived. They had a stranglehold, he explained, over the traditional modes of money-making: owning vast tracts of fertile land, securing government contracts for local infrastructure projects, and controlling the extraction of coal from the earth and sand from the riverbanks. These were not people with scruples, he said, since these professions are shorthand for the exploitation of farm workers, bribes to government officials and income from illegal mining. Instead, they needed to protect their assumed sense of superiority. âMost have qualms about associating with lower castes and Muslims,â he said. If you spot a person with an upper caste surname, such as Pandey, on a police charge sheet, you can tell they are down on their luck, he told me.
Back at the police station, as the superintendent took questions from the press, the suspects stood completely still, their eyes fixed on the row of reporters. I stood directly opposite the man on the extreme left, the only one wearing a proper T-shirt. A pithy slogan ran across his chest: âYour Limit Is You.â
The police had tracked down scammers thanks to local informers. But who were these informers? The accused often pointed fingers at upper-caste people from their villages who had shown their displeasure at lower-caste familiesâ displays of wealth. Not all of them could be passing on information, but there was no doubt that plenty of resentment had built within their ranks. As I went around the villages, the tension was impossible to ignore.
In one village, landlord Bunty Singh* regularly reported boys riding off motorbikes. Once the most influential family, the Singhs now faced competition from Dalit families who had raised their status through cyberfraud. Their men once worked on his farms and their women rolled tobacco in the courtyard of his bungalow. He sold the harvest at a wholesale market and the hand-rolled tobacco to a factory. Some days, he paid the workers; other times, he sent them back with grain for their kitchens and straw for their roofs. Now, some of those families have become millionaires, he said with an air of intolerable woe. âTheir daily transactions would shock you. These days you see large currency notes either in the wallet of a politician or a cyber-chor.â
That politicians became fabulously wealthy through corruption was a foregone conclusion; much harder to accept was the idea of marginalised people using similar means. While we were having this conversation, Singh kept an eye on the road, noting every person and vehicle that passed by. He pointed out some of the men riding motorbikes, detailing their position in the local network of cyberfraud. This one is a mastermind; that one is still at school; the one in the backseat has just come out on bail. He asked me if I wanted the names of every cyberthief active in his village. I declined his offer.
Singh had reported many of these âboysâ to the police, but most were released on bail. Enough members of the local upper-caste elite were indirectly profiting from the scams themselves.
In another nearby village, I met a Brahmin who sold construction supplies to the newly wealthy âcyberâ families. He claimed they were building grand houses. âThey have towering gates, Italian marble and air-conditioned bathrooms. The idea is that even if there is a raid and the police take away everything, they will still have the house.â He narrated the tragic story of a client burying illicit cash in a sandpit after receiving word of a police raid, only to have it stolen by neighbours.
The supplier himself did not let caste stand in the way of genuine connections. After closing his shop, he told me, he hung out at the village tea stalls where cyber-chors often narrated their escapades. âEven going to jail is part of the adventure. Money is not the only reason they take the risk of arrest. There is also
maza [fun] in what they do.â Being a Brahmin, he argued he couldnât make scam calls himself, but he took pride in the number of ârock starâ cyber-chors he personally knew.
While cheating strangers, Jitu was able to peer into their lives. On the other end of the line, many of his victims lived in bustling cities, worked in air-conditioned offices and spent their money on luxury goods. Some of his victims would certainly have had to struggle to get where they were. Yet he suspected that few truly understood what it meant to be trapped in oneâs circumstances.
This, however, wasnât the justification he and his accomplices gave themselves for stealing. They simply believed that if they didnât claw their way toward a better life, no one else would do it for them. And if others suffered along the way, that was just the collateral damage of trying to wrestle free from fate.
Using the income he earned from the scams, Jitu opened a supply shop in the village. âMy wife set up a tailoring business from home.â Their two sons didnât just go to a good school but also acquired a private tutor, an upper-caste retired schoolteacher who comes to his home to teach them nursery rhymes. âShe is not an ordinary woman. Her son is a pilot, and her daughter is a doctor,â said Jitu.
When Jitu was making serious money, he felt like the master of his own destiny. He expressed that the way his victims did: through ordering a laundry list of luxury goods â phones, clothes, shoes â for himself and his family. âWe didnât always keep those things at home. That would have attracted too much attention. Instead, I entrusted some of those items to the Brahmins in my village. They agreed to store them on the condition that they could keep some items for themselves. It was a mutually beneficial agreement. The police would never suspect them, no matter what phones they use or what clothes their women wear.â
For Jituâs associates, the lavish lifestyle that fraud permitted them was one that would not be remarked upon were they from upper-caste families. But to be safe, they needed the complicity of those they were trying to displace. âThe level at which you see yourself is not the level at which others see you.â This dichotomy was a constant struggle for him. âIf the police believe my level is to carry a budget phone worth 20,000 rupees, they will be alarmed to see me carrying a flagship model priced at 50,000 rupees.â By contrast, he said to me: âIf I gave you a silk outfit, you could walk around the whole village wearing it, and no one would think it was bought with scam money. Thatâs why every cyber-chor needs upper-caste friends.â
Over the past few years, as police raids have become a daily affair in these villages, a spin-off economy has emerged to help the scammers evade the law. Schoolchildren earned pocket money for watching the entry points to the village. Busybodies took protection money from the scammers to keep their names off the police radar. Police officers accepted bribes to avoid making arrests, and mediators openly quoted their fees for arranging bail. At the district court in Deoghar, advocates dropped cases involving murder and rape to represent cybercrooks; a single bail plea meant a fee of 25,000 rupees, cash in hand.
When all other avenues failed, political representatives came to the rescue of cyberthieves. From council officials to members of parliament, local politics was increasingly tied to digital scams. The relationship was mutually beneficial: money earned from the scams funded electoral campaigns and power linked to political office shielded the perpetrators from arrest.
Cyberscams, and the wealth, fame and notoriety they brought in their wake, had disrupted the caste hierarchy in unforeseen ways. For upper castes in the region, some of those disruptions were more potent than others. Dalit individuals refusing to work in their homes, farms or factories posed an inconvenience â but that could always be remedied. If some refused, others would eventually step in.
Far more troubling was the realisation that lower-caste individuals no longer relied on them as gatekeepers. Armed with a growing mastery of mobile technology, one of the most transformative tools in todayâs world, they were reshaping their lives in ways the upper castes struggled to comprehend. Left behind, many clung to caste pride as their only solace.
Jitu found that his relationships with upper-caste people were becoming strained. He sensed a growing hostility from some. âThink about this: long after India was liberated from colonial rule, we were still serving upper-caste people. Our women cleaned their cattle sheds, and our men disposed of their dead cattle. For generations they treated us as slaves. But today, we have become aware of our rights,â he said. âThis angers them. They give our names at the police stations.â A caste battle was under way, he said, and he was prepared to fight. âWe will not be trapped back in slavery in the name of tradition.â
In 2019, Jitu contested the post of the president of Kherbariâs Dalit community and won unopposed. Shortly after, he hosted a grand lunch for the visiting chief of an organisation that rejected the patronage of upper-caste-dominated parties to strive for political power for Dalits. Hundreds of people from the lower castes came to pay their respects. The upper-caste elites watched from a distance.
Two weeks later, in an overnight raid that no cyberthief saw coming, the local police arrested Jitu and put him in jail. After 93 days, he came out a man questioning his life choices. His mood, when we met after his release, was doleful. âWe, the cyber-chors, know how to make money. What we donât know is what to do with the ill-gotten wealth. A professional might make 40,000 rupees a month. He has clear ideas for how to spend it. He pays the rent and the school fees, buys gifts for parents once a year during the festive season, saves for his daughterâs wedding. For us scammers, it is different: if we have one good day, we make 50,000 rupees. Just sitting in the field. It distorts proportion. People go berserk buying things. If you make a lot of money, your wife basks in the luxuries that come with it. She will ask you to take her to the market. She will make you buy the priciest objects. She wonât share those things with her mother-in-law. She will rarely allow your mother to buy something for herself with your money. But if you die, your mother is left to suffer while your wife marries someone else.â
I could not stop him midway to ask what brought on this diatribe against the wives of cyberthieves. We were sitting in our usual spot, in my rented car parked on the path leading out from his village. In spite of the air-conditioning in the car, Jitu was drenched in sweat. Every ping on my phone made him jump in his seat.
After he went to jail, his mother had dug a pit in the field behind their house and buried a total of 50 phones. When he pulled them out three months later, he found rainwater had rotted their internal circuits. âWhat else could it be but an omen?â He paused, looking at his hands as if they were still smeared with mud. âThis work is not easy,â he resumed in a pensive tone, his voice growing heavier with every word.
Sir, are you using the PhonePe Wallet app?â
âI am. What is this about?â
âSir, the company is offering a cashback of 4,999 rupees âŚâ
âChutiya [asshole], donât waste my time.â
Jituâs scam calls had been shorter lately. He had dug out his stash of phishing phones and returned them to regular use. But âbusinessâ was increasingly uncertain. At first, he blamed himself. âI used to be very clever. Thatâs how I pulled off all those scams for years on end. But after coming out of jail, my brain began to slow down.â
Talking to his peers in the village, he realised he wasnât the only one failing to reel in targets. They were still making money from the scams, but compared to what they illicitly earned in the previous years, there had been a downturn. âWe made a killing when the time favoured us. The spate of good luck is passing,â he said, perched in his usual spot in my hired carâs front seat. âThe public is becoming aware,â he said, dropping his voice to a horrified whisper. âThey are watching YouTube videos where they show you the whole scam playing out. Their new phones can detect scam calls.â
One day, Jitu and I walked over to a one-room house at the far end of a field. He was once again feeling gloomy. His heart sank when he thought about friends and relatives who have died over the years, he said. âIn this business, we can never tell how long we have got.â Karma, he said, would confront him like it did every man who lived. It was only a matter of time. But still, he had to keep going, keep finding new scams. His wife had to be kept happy; his sons had to be educated. Perhaps, if the occasion arose, votes would have to be bought. The numbers did not dial themselves.
* Some names and identifying details have been changed
This is an edited extract of Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World published by Penguin Random House India
Looks like this will never stop and we will all be targeted 
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