Hardly a morning passes without a news report of either a pensioner losing their life savings to a scam or an everyday citizen discovering their identity has been stolen and their credit ruined overnight. In journalist and author Snigdha Poonam’s latest book, Scam Lands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World, she uncovers the systematic nature of India’s scam industry. 

In a compelling interview with Newslaundry’s Manisha Pande, she offers fascinating insights into her personal encounters with this murky world and what it reveals about the socioeconomic realities of this country. 

Snigdha shares a chilling theory that scams are deeply personal and tailored to individual weaknesses. She says, "For each of us, there is a soulmate in the scam world... It's a soulmate that you don't want to meet, but sooner or later, they will find you.” She also notes, “Each of us has a vulnerability that we may not be aware of, but it'll become clear to us once we're close to being scammed.”  

To illustrate this point, Snigdha recalls how she was almost scammed via a hacked WhatsApp message from her sister's number, only realising the fraud because the sender didn't use her pet name. The vulnerability the scammer exploited here, as she explains, was her close relationship with her siblings. 

In a society as unequal as ours, Poonam asks what happens when you encounter a generation that is more ambitious than their elders, but the opportunities before them are fewer. What you have today is a “parallel economy of scams and frauds” that "operates at the level of an empire”, she explains.  

This ‘scam industrial complex’, Snigdha argues, supports the entire local infrastructure across different regions, including political funding. “Even the MLAs and MPs are involved because they are asking these guys to fund their elections,” she says. 

Ultimately, Manisha says that this reflects “the failure of the Indian state”. Snigdha responds by saying, “We have made a society where you can't trust anyone... and deception has become a way of life.” 

Delving into the morality adopted by scammers, Snigdha notes that they often view their work as a form of social justice or a reaction to being left behind in this world. They also justify it by pointing to inequality within India; as she explains, the scammers feel “it doesn't hurt them that much, but it makes our life.”

But do they feel any guilt or remorse? She gives the example of one scammer, ‘Jitu’, who claimed he didn’t feel guilt in the traditional sense because his lifestyle provided its own form of penance. “There were infinite ways in which a cyber thief paid for his bad deeds. He doesn't have a moment of peace... perpetual anxiety serves as fitting punishment,” observes Snigdha. 

Watch.