‘AI is already a force multiplier for a new wave of transnational fraud’

Snigdha Poonam is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. It won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction in India and was longlisted in 2019 for the PEN America Literary Awards. For fifteen years, her work has shown how major global phenomena shape human lives, often by focusing on a single person, group or event to reveal how transformative forces act on society. 

Her work has been published in Granta, Financial Times Weekend, Guardian Longreads, New York Times Arts, The Economist’s 1843 magazine and Bloomberg’s Businessweek. In 2023, she received a MacDowell fellowship for creative nonfiction to finish Scamlands. She lives in Oxfordshire.

Her latest book is Scamlands: Inside the Asian empire of fraud that preys on the world. It is published by Penguin Random House India.

Snigdha Poonam’s Scamlands is a gripping account of scams from the rural heartland of Bihar, where she grew up and ending in a shining city by the South China Sea. Her reportage is fascinating as she follows the networks of deceit, creating a shadow economy, that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust. 

The following interview was conducted via email. 

Why did you choose to write about scamsters? What triggered this intense interest that engaged you for more than five years in this project? 

I actually began this journey with my previous book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, so to be precise, I’ve spent closer to a decade immersed in the underworld of scams and fraud.

That earlier book, Dreamers, followed young men and women in small towns and villages in some parts of India. It traced their quest to become rich, famous, powerful, whatever it was they aspired to. It was meant to be a portrait of a generation that felt very different from mine, even though I was only a few years older. They were mostly in their twenties, but their worldview, their sense of possibility, seemed dramatically different.

As a journalist, I travelled constantly and met young people everywhere. I was curious about how they thought about their lives, their country, and their future. And again and again, our conversations returned to their dreams. Even in the poorest villages, young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds would tell me they wanted to be the richest person in the world, or the local Member of Parliament, or a Bollywood star. I followed some of these journeys for years. 

But over time, it became clear that despite their ambition and enterprise, the barriers they faced—barriers that had existed for generations—were not going to dissolve just because they wished them away. A few who already had some advantages (family connections, caste privilege, certain forms of cultural capital) managed to advance. But they were the exception. I began to see them drift, and in some cases, make moral compromises (as they entered politics, or other fields) because the straightforward route simply wasn’t taking them where they wanted to go. 

By the end of that reporting, I noticed something more disturbing: those who were desperate to find a job were being pulled into scam centres that were springing up across the big cities. I saw an entire shadow infrastructure rising in places like Delhi, Gurgaon, parts of Mumbai and Bengaluru. Thousands of young people worked in scam call centres targeting victims mostly in the West. 

Even after Dreamers was published, I couldn’t detach myself from this underworld I had stumbled into. Around the same time, India’s digital infrastructure was expanding rapidly — a massive push to digitise everything: bank accounts, payment systems, wallets. And with every new digital touchpoint came a new opportunity to scam someone.

The scam economy proliferated extraordinarily fast. And since I was already deeply inside it, it felt natural, almost necessary, to keep going, to explore how vast it was, how deep it ran, and how many people it was drawing in. That’s really where this project began.

What are the broad categories of scamming that exist? You mention many exploit the loneliness of the victim by offering love and partnership especially the Chinese scamsters netting gullible victims in the USA. Are there specific schemes to geographical territories? 

Snigdha: Anything you need, anything you desire, or anything you fear can be turned into a weapon against you. Depending on the territory they are operating in, or the market they are targeting, they adjust their scams to match how desire or fear works in that particular society.

For example, love, sex, romance. These are universal desires, so those scams work everywhere. They work in India. They work in the United States, in China, in Poland.

In India, job scams are among the most common and people fall for them very easily. We have millions of people who would do anything to land a job. Many job scams begin with data leaks. Someone at an employment portal leaks the CVs, including contact details. Or, in a similar scenario, someone at a bank leaks data of people who might need a loan or have applied for one in the past. That information becomes the basis of loan scams. 

 Then there is greed. That is how the book begins, with lottery scams. A scammer called me and told me I had won a lottery of twenty-five lakh rupees. If someone calls and says you have been chosen to receive twenty-five lakh rupees under some invented scheme, many people want that money. And if they are told that they need to deposit twenty-five thousand rupees into a bank account to process paperwork or pay a supposed tax, many people pay it. The scammer can keep adding more fees and taxes. Sometimes they gain access to your bank account and take everything.

There is also fear. This is what we see with the digital arrests in India, which are now among the most prolific and frightening scams. They work on a simple idea. If an ordinary person in India gets a call from someone pretending to be the police, or the judiciary, or the government, they become very scared. This is especially true for people from minority communities. If they are told that their address or bank account or Aadhaar number is somehow linked to criminal activity, they can be overwhelmed by fear. If the scammer tells them they cannot call anyone because the government is watching, and that they must stay on the line and transfer all the money in their account to another account that is supposedly being held by the authorities during an investigation, many victims do exactly that.

Scamming is a large-scale industrial complex business. It cuts across international boundaries. The evidence points to horrific torture chambers of the individuals who are made to scam overseas victims. Many of these individuals are poor migrants from other countries, in search of better economic prospects. Your narrative seems to suggest that these are mostly to be found in China and Southeast Asia, but don't we have these in India as well? How does this form of labour hiring and exploitation work?

Snigdha: That’s right. The Chinese-origin cyber-crime cartels have built a vast infrastructure across Southeast Asia, and they traffic young people from lower-income countries—often from English-speaking regions—with the goal of targeting victims anywhere in the wealthier parts of the world. That includes places like Singapore, which has a large population of affluent individuals, as well as the United States and other Western countries.

There are similarities in how job seekers end up in these scam operations, whether they’re domestic or transnational. At the core of the system is usually a simple hook: the promise of a job that doesn’t exist. It almost always begins with a fake job offer.

These offers can show up in multiple ways. A person might see an ad on a Facebook page, or be contacted directly on social media, or through a private channel like Telegram. Sometimes the approach comes through someone they know—a recruiter in their community, a friend of a friend, or a local middleman who appears trustworthy.

What makes the transnational side so much more frightening is how organized and anonymous the recruitment networks are. The system operates through multiple layers of human traffickers. At the top level are recruiters based inside the scam compounds in Southeast Asia, who almost never reveal their identities. They outreach to a second layer of traffickers—people who operate through WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook and who specialize in trapping jobseekers. That layer, in turn, connects with individuals on the ground in countries like India—people who might know the job seekers personally or who have access to local networks.

One victim of scam slavery told me that he had received a job offer from a recruiter in his village. Following that lead, he ended up moving through a long trafficking chain that eventually delivered him to Sihanoukville in Cambodia—where he was held hostage. Once he arrived, his passport was confiscated, and if he failed to carry out the scam work required of him, anything could happen: denial of food, solitary confinement, beatings, even death.

Scamlands shows that scamsters in India work mostly individually but at times the local community/neighbourhood is "civil" enough to not encroach upon each other's territories. How is this enforced? Isn't there a mastermind to these operations? Have I understood this correctly? 

Snigdha: The hinterland scams often involve entire communities. What I found particularly striking in Barpeta in Assam was how many different people, within the same village, were connected to the scam economy in some way. There isn’t always a single mastermind, but everyone knows their role. They may not be full-time scammers, yet they still play a critical part in keeping the ecosystem running.

For example, there’s a doctor at the local Public Health Centre who has a legitimate job, but he also makes a side income by signing fake death certificates—fake in the sense that they show someone dying on a date, months or even a year after the person actually passed away. In that particular story, the entire scam economy revolved around fake deaths. The scam typically starts when someone dies. Then an insurance scammer steps in, impersonating a family member—or bribing the real family member—so that a life insurance policy can be taken out in the deceased person’s name. Months later, they present the fabricated death certificate to claim the payout. 

They also need someone who can produce forged birth certificates for people who never existed. Just like in Jharkhand, the Panchayat system is often involved; the village chief is someone who signs off on official documents. They need the local customer-service centres, because that’s where the bank accounts are opened to receive the insurance payout. These individuals may not be full-time scamsters either—they also deal with legitimate customers, but their services are embedded in the scam economy.

Even e-commerce delivery workers end up playing a role. Once scammers gain access to a victim’s bank account (often through OTP fraud) they don’t want the stolen money going into their own accounts, which would leave a trail. So, they use the funds to buy expensive items online and have them shipped to fabricated addresses in their village. The house number doesn’t exist, but the delivery worker knows exactly where to bring the package, because he gets a cut. Again, it’s not his primary job, but he benefits from the system.

And you’re right: in areas where multiple scams run side by side—an e-commerce scam, a phone-wallet scam, a credit card scam—territory matters. One community might “own” a certain scam, and others don’t encroach on it. There is an internal logic and a kind of informal order that everyone understands.

Is there a code of honour amongst scamsters? What is their rule book? 

Snigdha: There is no single rule book, but some patterns are common. 

One is the importance of distance. Many scammers think about the distance between themselves and their victims. Someone in a rural area, for instance, often does not want to steal from another person in a nearby village. Even if they are calling numbers at random and do not know who will pick up, they hope to reach someone in a city. As I argue in the book, scamming is not only a way to earn easy money. The instinct can also be to take revenge on what feels like an unfair or uncaring world or system. So, a scammer in a village may feel less guilty if the victim is a prosperous individual in a big city. Similarly, a scammer sitting in a call centre in Delhi or Chandigarh feels less guilty if the target is in the United States or the United Kingdom. It is not only the physical distance. They are also aware of the huge inequality between their own lives and the lives of those they are scamming. That helps lighten some of the moral burden.

Another pattern is how the ability to scam someone can earn respect within a community. If a scammer manages to cheat someone who is not only wealthy but influential, they gain status. There are real cases where people have scammed the wife of a police commissioner, the brother of a former chief minister, even a former chief minister or a member of parliament. When that happens, the scammer becomes a sort of local hero within their network. 

You document a class and caste shake up in the making, due to the new socio-economic mobility offered by mobile phone technology. Case in point being these scamsters, many of whom come from impoverished and/or disadvantaged backgrounds. Also, many of the stories are from the rural hinterlands of India. Do you think that the monies accrued in this manner will be sufficient for them to get rid of their caste discrimination, especially in the context of the Dalits whom you put in the spotlight? What did you glean? 

Snigdha: The caste system intersects with these scams in some obvious ways and in some very surprising ones. But no, I don’t think the money earned through scams can be a sustainable way for communities to uplift themselves in any lasting sense.

For some individuals, or even for tightly knit networks, it can look possible for a while. Many of them do earn a lot of money in a short span of time. Some scams run for years, constantly evolving. With phone-based scams or text-based scams, the context keeps changing, so the scammers keep updating their skills, their knowledge, their scripts. 

Some individuals did earn a great deal. But it never seemed like a way to end entrenched inequalities. At most, it can look like the playing field is being levelled for a brief moment. Very quickly, though, you see how class and caste tensions reassert themselves. Jealousies start to surface. Sometimes it is a neighbour. Sometimes it is someone from an upper caste community. Sometimes it is a collaborator who feels cheated. Many people are waiting for a chance to bring you down, especially those along the caste and class spectrum who cannot accept the idea of someone they once employed as a farm labourer now building a large house in the same village. These are the same people who might once have paid them not in cash but in leftover food or a bundle of straw for a leaking roof. And now they are reporting them to the police.

Even when scammers keep updating their methods, it gets harder over time. Some scams become so common that people begin to recognise the signs. There are YouTube videos demonstrating the scripts. Banks run awareness campaigns. People get arrested.

And whatever money they make, they also spend. They build large houses. They make luxurious purchases. The money does not usually last.

Of course, there are exceptions. I did come across villages where scam money funded a school or helped build a pond for fisheries. But these were occasional stories, not the norm. More often, you would walk into a village and see mud homes and dirt roads, and then suddenly five or six lavish houses with bright colours, tall gates, and huge balconies. And everyone knew exactly who lived in them. When police arrived for raids, they went straight to those houses. They would seize music systems, fixed deposits, even remote-controlled curtains. 

So yes, there is upward mobility at the individual level. But I don’t think it is enough, or stable enough, to break the deeper structures of caste. Some scamsters invest in their children’s education, and perhaps that will create openings in the future. But for now, I think we have to wait and see.

Chasing the truth is a dangerous proposition. How do you verify the details mentioned to you? What was your methodology? While investigating these stories, did you own a different mobile phone to your personal device? 

Snigdha: Parts of the book might make it seem as though I was chasing the truth, but in reality, I was simply following a story, and I went wherever it took me. 

It was dangerous in parts, but I generally managed to stay out of harm’s way. Scamsters are criminals, of course, because what they do is criminal, but not all of them are frightening. Some were perfectly willing to sit down and talk to me, though not in public and not in their homes. One individual, for instance, would only meet me in my car at a distance from his village, where no one could see us, and I did not feel threatened by him at all.

I usually had someone from the area with me. That made a big difference. But yes, in other situations I did have to take many more precautions.

For instance, when I was reporting in Southeast Asia, I was faced with scam lords who acted like dangerous gangsters. Violence was routine. They shot at people. They threw the bodies out on the streets. People had been murdered for crossing them, exposing them, or trying to escape from the scam compounds. They had armed criminals working for them, and the threat was very real. In those situations, I took every precaution I could. I left my number and location with someone I trusted. I informed local activists about where I was going and followed their advice on how to stay out of their way.

And yes, I did use two phones. At first it was simply practical: one phone for speaking with scamsters, especially in situations where I was trying to understand their work by pretending to be a scammer. They would give me tasks to do on that phone. I never scammed anyone, of course, but they needed to believe I had a separate device that wasn’t my personal one.

Later, when reporting in Southeast Asia, having two phones became a safety measure. One activist insisted that if I were kidnapped, my main phone would be taken from me. So, I kept a second phone hidden in my clothes. That was the phone I would use to call for help to be rescued, or to reach the Indian embassy, or anyone else who could get me out. 

What is the total estimated value of the money swindled by scamsters, across sectors? Is there any way of measuring it? What is the rate of growth of this shadow economy? In India, bank transactions are mostly done digitally. These scamster rely on this modus operandi too. So, what percentage, if any at all, of the recipient’s account can be traced by the authorities while tracking the stolen money? The impression that I got from your book was that many managed to get away scot-free with the money. Is there any government regulation in the offing for scamsters? 

Snigdha: By definition, it is a shadow economy. Because of this, I don’t think there is any reliable way to measure the total value of the money swindled by scamsters, certainly not across all the scams in circulation at any given time. That was never my aim either. I entered the story as a writer trying to explore what happens to society when scamming becomes a way of life, when trust breaks down. 

But while following the trail, I kept coming across official data about how much money people were losing. These estimates were based only on reported cases; people who actually go to the police. As you can imagine, that is a very small percentage. Many victims feel ashamed. Many do not want to get into the legal process or file an FIR. They simply stay quiet.

Even so, shocking numbers would surface. With digital scams, for example, the Home Ministry had a figure of around 2.7 billion dollars, or roughly 22,845 crore rupees, lost in the past year alone in India. They also reported a 400 to 500 percent jump from the previous year. 

But I am still cautious about putting any definitive numbers on record, and that is because a major theme in the book is that these scams are no longer contained within the borders of any one country.

Some scams do operate within a specific region in India, and you can get a sense of the money involved there. But that does not apply to the full picture the book lays out. Technology, the internet, and a vast labour force willing to work for anyone anywhere mean that you cannot always know who the victims are, who the scammers are working for, or where the money is going. 

In one of the book’s stories, the scammers are based in India but are working for entities they themselves cannot identify or locate. Those entities turn out to be in a completely different part of the world. The victims are in yet another region. As I went deeper into the story, I saw this more and more: the entire system becoming more global and more underground. 

And this brings me to another part of your question. It is very hard to trace the stolen money. The ecosystem of digital transactions makes it extremely easy to move and hide funds once they have been taken. Cryptocurrency has become a common and convenient way to push money out of the reach of authorities. 

Most countries do have regulations, but there are also enormous levels of political corruption. These scam networks are often closely connected to systems of political patronage or other forms of localised corruption. All of this makes it very difficult for the scams to be uprooted completely.

In the many years of investigation, did you ever figure out why would the scamsters put so much effort into these elaborate schemes despite living with fear on a daily basis? 

Snigdha: I think I did, at least to the extent that I could through spending time in their world and talking to them. It is all there in the stories. And sometimes the scammers themselves articulate it much better than I ever could, but I can try to give you the gist.

In many of the scenarios I encountered, the starting point was that they had nothing to lose. They were starting from a place of having no opportunities at all. Someone pulls them into a network, gives them a small part in a scam, or they see someone else doing it and get the idea that they could try something similar.

At the beginning, it is mostly a means to earn money, to support their families, to meet basic needs. But very early in the process, it mutates into something else. They see how much money can be earned through these schemes if they become more ambitious or form a larger network. Unlike a traditional career path, where you wait years for a promotion, in this world two months can completely change your life. You go from having nothing to building an enviable bank balance. So even though fear becomes a daily companion, they continue. They know that if they can simply live with that fear, they can make a huge amount of money.

And it is not only about money. In rural settings, money is also power. It is influence. It changes your position in the marriage market. If you are an established scammer in a cluster of villages, people want to marry their daughters to you. Politicians come to you for funding before an election. The police will release you for a bribe even if you are arrested. Someone will put up bail. I saw cases where even the village head, the panchayat chief, would arrange bail because the scammer’s family would pay him lakhs of rupees to do it.

There is a whole system that makes it harder and harder to walk away from this way of life. And the hardest part is that none of the scammers I met ever lost awareness of what lay on the other side — if they stopped.  Nothing waiting for them. The money comes and goes. A big house is built, but that is not the end of it. They have children in English-medium schools. Their wives start cooperatives in the village that need funding. They open small shops that also require support. They cannot simply step away. Walking away would mean falling back into that same emptiness. 

So, despite the constant fear, they keep going. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Will the AI tools increase the scourge of scamsters and their elaborate schemes? 

Snigdha: Artificial intelligence is already a force multiplier for a new wave of transnational fraud: It can generate scripts, fabricate composite identities across text, voice and video, and enable hyper-personalized manipulations that make scams more convincing and more profitable.