Scamlands: From Cambodia to Jamtara, a deep dive into global fraud networks

A sharp, immersive look at phone fraud networks, their victims, and the hidden economies that keep them alive

Scam Lands:  Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World

by Snighda Poonam

Published by Penguin

284 pages ₹799

  In the prologue of Snigdha Poonam’s second book, four successful Asian-origin American ladies are meeting for lunch at a restaurant in Boston, one winter afternoon in 2023. They are trying to rebuild their devastated lives. All four had fallen prey to cyber scams and lost hefty fortunes. Cindy, Lily, Michelle and Wendy were all victims of scammers who specialised in targeting professionally successful, older women of Asian origin in the United States. The scam had spread like wildfire through the US, trapping thousands over the period of a couple of years. The investigators of the scam would name it the Pig Butchering Scam. The victims were lured in through text and chat messages, and the scammers would spend a lot of time assiduously wooing them and earn their confidence. 

The narration in the prologue is reminiscent of the dinner that Stephen Bradley organises for the three other victims of Harvey Metcalfe’s scam in Jeffrey Archer’s Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.  But the resemblance is fleeting — Snigdha Poonam has her own strong narrative style and the scams she tracks are even more interesting and have a larger geographical footprint than the one recounted in Archer’s fictional masterpiece. 

Ms Poonam’s reporting style while following the scams is daring. She tries to get hired by a couple of the scamsters who try to scam her through the popular lottery scam. Some of the scamsters are candid about their job. They are relatively small-time players at the end of the chain — with a mobile phone and a script to follow. They often do not make fortunes and neither do they have glamorous lives. Their days and wins are uneven. On good days, they make a fair amount of money. On bad days, they find no victims. 

Ms Poonam goes to Jamtara — the area made famous for the number of scams originating from it. Netflix has even made a TV series about Jamtara — Sabka Number Aayega. Small towns in the district are hotbeds of scamster activity. Farmlands provide good cover — a number of the young scamsters go deep into farms and call from there to make it less easy for their locations to be pinpointed. 

The scams — and particularly the money made by scamsters — have helped the area’s economy. Families with successful scamsters have built big houses, bought lots of fancy stuff, big vehicles, and created an ecosystem of sorts. They have also become role models for younger boys who want to make money quickly. But the scams have also created social and caste tensions. Initially, the relatively well-off upper caste landowners aided the scamsters who were often from lower castes and poorer backgrounds. The help could be direct or indirect, depending on the distance the well-off people wanted to keep from the scams taking place. 

But as many of the scamsters from lower castes made and flaunted their wealth, things started souring. In many cases, the earlier prosperous partners have turned into informers, leading the police to the homes of scamsters. It is an interesting phenomenon and the author captures it well, observing and writing what many others would have missed. This is what raises the book above the dozens of books on scams that come out every year. 

Mobile scams are ubiquitous but aren’t the only type of frauds. In Assam, there are many life insurance scams taking place. In some cases, living people have been certified dead to claim money from insurance companies. Often the person declared dead is not even aware that multiple insurance policies have been taken against their name. A helpful ecosystem of doctors, clerks, insurance agents and others are all complicit. The fees they charge for their roles are reasonably modest. 

The other type of insurance scam is even more innovative. Often, insurance policies are taken out in names of people who are already dead — and then the same person ostensibly dies within weeks or months of taking the policy. Dead bodies are produced and sent for post-mortems, death certificates are duly issued and then claims raised. 

There are other scams that Ms Poonam chases down and writes about. At the end of the book, she goes to Cambodia to check out the scam farms set up there to house bottom-rung employees of the Pig Butchering scam. They resembled prisons. 

Though the author is very much a part of the story, she ensures that she does not become the main character as many others do. She ensures that the scams and scamsters get the coverage, not her own reporting journey. The author’s first book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World was eminently readable. This one is even better. It is non-fiction but can give good crime fiction a run for its money.

 

The reviewer, former Editor of Businessworld and Business Today magazines, is author of Will India Get Rich Before It Turns 100? A Reality Check and co-author of  Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V G Siddhartha