PHISHING AS COTTAGE INDUSTRY
(He works hard for his family, what is wrong in that? He will eventually come out of jail),” is a common refrain. While the cases pan out in court, Sitaram in Jamtara jail is equally nonchalant. “Sab jhooth hai (All lies),” he says with a shrug. Mandal is a legend now, a sort of Amitabh Bachchan of cybercrime, say the police. But he is only one of hundreds of Jamtara youth who are believed to have taken up phishing as a career.
INo one seems to know when the young people of Jamtara district started phishing. The lore goes that some young men who went to Delhi got involved with an online racket called ‘Chehra Pehchano’ (recognise the face). People were asked to identify mildly blurred images of Bollywood stars for a reward. Gullible victims called on the numbers given and were asked to pay a processing fee so that they could get the gift they had won—an SUV. Once the money had been credited to the account number provided by the fraudsters, they stopped taking the victim’s calls. Police say a few youth involved in this racket returned to Jamtara and were the first ones to begin phone phishing. Gradually, more and more youngsters were drawn to it.
Jamtara has 1,161 villages and most of the population depends on rainfed farming except in about a hundred villages. “The cops have zeroed in on these villages where phishing seems to be the only industry,” says Ajay Kumar Sinha, officer-in-charge at the Karmatand police station, part of the jurisdiction along with Narayanpur, where most of these villages are located. Since April, the two stations have got over 150 notices from police in 16 states with requests to find one fraudster or another. Jamtara SP Manoj K. Singh points to the runaway construction in villages in the Karmatand station area. The villagers are flush with illegally acquired cash, he adds.
Kalajhariya village, which has a mobile tower that gets 2,500 calls a day, and Dudhania with its flashy new pucca houses are cybercrime datelines in Jamtara. As our vehicle rolls into Dudhania on a mid-summer Sunday in the last week of June, we come across village women dancing to Bollywood tunes belting out of massive loudspeakers. The celebrations peter out as we approach. The villagers don’t want to talk to us. They blame the police and journalists for spoiling a party that had continued undisturbed from 2011 to 2014, when the police made the first arrests. “Baat hi nahin karna hai ji. Koi baaharwala nahin chahiye (We don’t want to talk at all. We don’t want any outsiders),” says a man in his forties. The womenfolk give us hostile looks.
The police focus on Jamtara, incidentally, has all to do with Pappu Mandal, 22, a high school dropout. A resident of Kasitand village, some three kilometres from Karmatand, Pappu has two pucca houses in the village today. But in November 2015, he made the mistake of calling up