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India's scam-driven economy laid bare.

masterchief_mirza

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51753362

This week, the BBC showed scammers at work in an Indian call centre, recorded by an activist who hacked into the company's security cameras. Staff were seen laughing at their victims in the US and the UK. But who are these scammers, and how do they justify their actions?

Behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, Piyush is telling me how he made a quarter of a million dollars.

"It was easy money," he says, detailing how he bought fancy cars and wore designer clothes.

From a modest background, Piyush made a fortune by defrauding innocent victims at the other end of a phone.

"To become a rock star we have to do something," he says.

"Become a thief?" I ask.

"Right," he replies coolly.

Piyush meets me in a friend's apartment, in one of Delhi's richest neighbourhoods. The group of young men I've come to talk to all have one thing in common - they've worked in India's scam call-centre industry.

The country is well-known for outsourcing jobs from Western countries to legitimate call centres, but there's also a thriving dark side.

For nine years after leaving college, Piyush was part of it. "I wasn't getting a job anywhere else and the money and the incentives were good," he says.

The company Piyush worked for ran what is known as a "tech support scam". It would send a pop-up to people's screens, telling them their computer had been infected by a "pornographic virus" or other malware, and giving them a helpline number to call.

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As panicking customers rang in, Piyush and his colleagues would milk them for money, to fix a problem that didn't actually exist.

Piyush tells me that tricking people is an "art".

"We used to target the old people," he says.

"There are many old people in the US who don't have families, are alone and are disabled, so it's very easy to trick them."

I look at this man sitting opposite me in his baggy jeans and hipster T-shirt and wonder how he could be so cold-hearted. How would he feel if his own grandparents were victims of scamming, I ask?

"Yeah, I will feel bad," he says. "I did it because I needed money and that's it."

Piyush tells me how once he forced a woman to hand over her last $100, just so he could meet a target. For her, on the other side of the world, it was Christmas. "I took that $100 and she cried a lot while making the payment. Yeah, this was the worst call I ever had," he says.

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Spying on the scammers
Campaigner Jim Browning hacked into a Delhi call centre run by Amit Chauhan and recorded this video:

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MediaCriminals on CCTV: Scammers caught red-handed
Readers in the UK can click here to watch Rajini Vaidyanathan's Panorama documentary

The call centre featured in the programme was raided by a police a few days later - Amit Chauhan, is now in custody

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Piyush went on to set up his own call centre. He tells me it was easy. He rented office space and told the landlord he was starting a marketing firm. His staff worked late hours due to the time difference with the US, so there were few other people around to ask questions about what they were up to.

As the boss, Piyush was constantly thinking of new ways to con customers out of cash. He drew up a script for another fraudulent scheme, known as the IRS scam, which involved cold-calling people in the US and telling them they'd get a tax refund of thousands if they first handed over $184.

"We used to tell them that the police will go to their house and arrest them if they didn't pay!" he says.

When he started out, Piyush was paid one rupee for every dollar he made in sales. So for a $100 dollar scam, he'd only get $1.25 (£1).

But once he became the boss the money flooded in. Some "lucky months" he took home $50,000 (£40,000).

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Another ex-scammer, Sam, got into the business unintentionally.

Unemployment in India is now higher than it has been for decades, so when Sam was looking for his first job he thanked a friend for telling him about a place he could earn good money without working too hard.

At the interview he was told it was a sales job, pitching products to customers in the USA.

It was only while he was being trained in how to talk to customers that he realised what he was getting into.

"After a month, when we actually made it to the floor, when we were supposed to go live, that's when we figured out the entire thing was a scam," he tells me.

By that point Sam felt it was too late to back out.

"I was making more money than an MBA graduate and I don't have a college degree," he remembers.

"I used to drink a lot, party a lot, what are you going to do with all that money when you literally you don't have any future plans?"

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ImageFormer scammer Sam told people he worked as a salesman for an IT company
Like some other scammers I've talked to, Sam wrestled with his conscience but told himself he was only targeting the wealthy.

"I just had to be sure that the customers weren't handing me the money for their food… so I always used to pitch to the big guys who can afford it," he says.

He could work someone's income out, he says, from "the way they talk, the sort of things they have on their computer".

"Is it OK to steal from people if you think they can afford it," I ask?

"Yeah," he replies confidently.

Sam says he's still in touch with some of the people he decided were too poor to be scammed, including a mother of three who worked in a fast food restaurant in the US.

He now helps her with any computer issues she might have, and is on her Christmas card list.

Sam says his high salary won him respect from his father, whom he no longer had to rely on for cash.

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As we talk, he leans over and shows me the watch on his wrist, worth about $400. It was a gift from his boss for meeting his targets.

But his father - and friends - didn't know how he had come into such wealth. "When they asked what I did, I told them I worked for an IT company as a salesman," he says.

Six months into the job, the call centre Sam worked at was raided by the police and was forced to shut down. Sam escaped arrest and within days secured employment in another similar business.

His bosses were detained for less than a day and he believes they just restarted the business under a different name. It's easy for such companies to operate under the radar, he tells me, which is why they continue to do so.

Sam now has a job with a reputable tech company and has long left the world of scamming. He says he decided to talk to me openly to appeal to others like him to pursue legal jobs, which offer better prospects in the long term - and where you don't run the risk of arrest.

Unlike Sam, Piyush didn't hide his job from his family.

"I told them everything. They knew I was earning a lot and were pleased," he says.

As I glance down at his jeans, I can see a patch stitched on, with the words "take every chance".

But after close to a decade of scamming he too quit, in fear of police crackdowns. He feels lucky he never got caught, and now regrets his actions.

"I felt good at the time," he says. "In hindsight it doesn't feel as good."

Piyush used his earnings to set up other legal businesses - but ended up losing it all.

"After that it didn't go right," he says.

"So, I would say it was karma."

Piyush and Sam are pseudonyms
 
You are mistaken if you think they are only ripping off Americans and Brits. You would be surprised at how many Indians they target, especially senior citizens.

With already unemployment at 45 years low, struggling economy, domestic security challenges , this is the last thing india wants. Shutting down of call centers, which employ massive number of Indians.
Most of these fake and scam guys operate out of Delhi and Calcutta and the actual IT industry is in Bangalore, Bombay, Pune and Hyderabad.
 
You are mistaken if you think they are only ripping off Americans and Brits. You would be surprised at how many Indians they target, especially senior citizens.


Most of these fake and scam guys operate out of Delhi and Calcutta and the actual IT industry is in Bangalore, Bombay, Pune and Hyderabad.

I thought Delhi and Calcutta are in India.
 
You seems a nice guy but the typical Indian mentality of denial gets the better of you, always. No offense.
Lol. None taken. I am not denying it. My parents get such calls. I have received the odd call from "Mastercard/Visa" saying they will cancel my debit card. It is a pretty big problem.
 
Why not a single UK parliamentarian and US Congressmen is raising this issue? Sponsoring India in hatred of Pakistan and China, at the expense of their own citizens, their jobs, is beyond lunacy, about time the western deep states must be brought to questioning.
You're missing the bigger picture. All sorts of ameterurish economic, military, political, social, interpersonal and diplomatic behaviours are tolerated in Hindustan by western nations as long as Hindustan keeps its part of the 72 year old deal and keeps Pakistan on the back foot. It's about priorities for western deep states.
 
Scamocholism is rather wide spread... not limited to call-centres!

As sometime back @PakSword shared with us here on PDF the good IndianScamocholists were on the run from UAE after Scamonising UAE Banks out of $7+Bln...

I still feel that UAE must forget ever recovering this money from India!

@SIPRA @masterchief_mirza @N.Siddiqui


This is how India has risen over the last 30-35 years from the bleak 90's when the Indian foreign exchange reserves have fallen to 900 million USD.

Whole of India is a big 'Ponzi' scheme, everyone is allowed to cheat and scam the other provided he is the wrong/right person at the right time.

It all started with the lacs and then millions of Indian migrants moving to the oil rich middle east and started sending the remittances, it created a big consumer economy, the nouveau rich. Than sprang thousands of roof top colleges and universities churning out millions of young people with barely any qualification but all was riding this IT bandwagon, few of the IIT's and IIS's in India made it look like millions of people coming out of rooftop colleges have some good education at par with IIT's(west believed that US specially)as by that time India the IT destination was established.

Every year close to 80,000 started landing in USA as IT tech. savvy, millennials through H1-B visas and that lasted for a good 15-18 years, now the numbers have halved. The rest was all like money makes money...more companies coming in...so on and so forth.
 
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Why not a single UK parliamentarian and US Congressmen is raising this issue? Sponsoring India in hatred of Pakistan and China, at the expense of their own citizens, their jobs, is beyond lunacy, about time the western deep states must be brought to questioning.
Trump can force Indian government into action against this with a single tweet. But the nature of this business is such that these scammers are unlikely to pay taxes or register their company under predictable occupation category. So they will simply go under the radar at the first sight of punitive action and then resurface after a year or so. Government may not have the resources to keep the crackdown perpetually active.

Most of these fake and scam guys operate out of Delhi and Calcutta and the actual IT industry is in Bangalore, Bombay, Pune and Hyderabad.
.

Some have been caught in Mumbai as well. I will not be surprised to find them in Chennai either. This has become a pan India menace.
 
This is how India have risen over the last 30-35 years from the bleak 90's when the Indian foreign exchange reserves have fallen to 900 million USD.

Whole of India is a big 'Ponzi' scheme, everyone is allowed to cheat and scam the other provided he is the wrong/right person at the right time.

It all started with the lacs and then millions of Indian migrants moving to the oil rich middle east and started sending the remittances, it created a big consumer economy, the nouveau rich. Then sprang thousands of roof top colleges and universities churning out millions of young people with barely any qualification but all was riding this IT bandwagon, few of the IIT's and IIS's in India made it look like millions of people coming out of rooftop colleges have some good education at par with IIT's(west believed that US specially)as by that time India the IT destination was established.

Every year close to 80,000 started landing in USA as IT tech. savvy, millennials through H1-B visas and that lasted for a good 15-18 years, now the numbers have halved. The rest was all like money makes money...more companies coming in...so on and so forth.





That's because indian IT specialists, scientists, engineers etc are nowhere near as intelligent, knowledgeable skilled or innovative as those from Europe, the Far East, South America etc. The whole world now knows this and doesn't listen to indian BS and propaganda.
 
That's because indian IT specialists, scientists, engineers etc are nowhere near as intelligent, knowledgeable skilled or innovative as those from Europe, the Far East, South America etc. The whole world now knows this and doesn't listen to indian BS and propaganda.

Have written it elsewhere...re-posting.

The rise of Indians in corporate world, doesn't have much to do with their engineering or science skills. Indians bring conservative, lean and mean style of working to the table, along with hard-work and down-to-earth-ness, and that is very much in demand across the global corporate world, in these turbulent financial times.

Its funny that, Indians are a huge percentage of IT industry, but their contribution to research and new ideas, is ZERO, Zilch. India, never devised any new programming language, or any operating system, new architectural paradigms or algorithms. Indian IT industry is all about low-skilled service sector, back offices and a large pool of internet coolies.
 
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Wow, the call center piece of the BPO pie in India, is insignificant now. And the so called call centers that exist, are either captive ( to banks or organizations) or standalone (contracted by companies in the US or EU). To cite an exam of some scam that may have happened years ago, and claim that it's a reflection of the current state of industry here, is not only utterly stupid, but also a futile attempt at propaganda. Perhaps Pakistan should ask Google, Facebook, Twitter et all, why they don't want to comply with your Newfound data protection bill ??
 
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