Digital push comes with a price, as surge in online scams ruins lives
New tactics involve conning victims via ‘tasks’ on social media platforms
Ankita Pandey, 28, had been on a maternity break for 18 months, and was itching to get back to work. Her career had suffered after her company shut down just after the pandemic began.
For weeks, Pandey sent in applications and uploaded her resume to online job portals, but had little luck. When she finally received a message in March, it felt like her prayers had been answered.
It was a work-from-home opportunity, just like she wanted. All she had to do was invest money and get close to 30 per cent returns on it after completing some “tasks” on social media.
Pandey received 2,800 rupees (HK$265) within minutes of finishing her first such task – to follow accounts and like some posts on Instagram. A few more likes later, Pandey had invested 10,000 rupees and earned 15,000 rupees.
Buoyed, Pandey kept pouring in money, waiting for higher returns.
In the next 24 hours, she sent in 90,000 rupees, until she had nothing left in her account. But her manager continued asking for more money if she wanted to get her investment back.
That was when she realised that she had been conned out of all her savings.
She is not alone.
While cybercrimes are not new to India, a new wave of them is spreading rapidly across the country – where unsuspecting victims like Pandey are being conned for millions of rupees.
These crimes are pushing many deep into debt and despair. Last month, a software engineer in the southern city of Hyderabad took his own life after losing more than 1.2 million rupees in a similar scheme, just months after he got married.
According to India’s national cybersecurity coordinator Rajesh Pant, the government’s portal for reporting such crimes receives more than 3,500 new complaints every day. Independent analysts believe the true number is significantly higher.
After taking power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a campaign to “transform India into a digitally empowered society”, with officials aggressively pushing the use of digital payments instead of cash.
But this priority has come at a cost. In 2014, India reported more than 9,600 cybercrimes. The number has continued to skyrocket: between January 2020 and December 2022, more than 1.6 million such crimes were recorded, according to data released by Indian Union Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai in parliament last December.
In 2021, India had among the most recorded cybercrimes in the world, after the United States, Britain and Canada, according to a US Federal Bureau of Investigation report in 2021.
India’s poor digital literacy might have a role to play. Despite its 750 million smartphone users, government data show that just 38 per cent of households are digitally literate, defined by the government as having the ability to understand and use digital technologies like computers, laptops and smartphones.
Analysts said these scams, though common, had now reached a dangerous tipping point, with the new wave of frauds that invited people to “earn” money through merely liking posts on social media.
Scammers are using the social media platforms to convince victims of their legitimacy, and scam tasks have evolved from asking victims to notionally “rent” industrial equipment in exchange for handsome rents to liking online posts and rating content online. Observers believe victims are easily convinced when they learn their “tasks” are based on established social media platforms.
According to Dhanya Menon, a Kerala-based cybercrime investigator, the latest Instagram and YouTube scams came to light “only weeks ago” and were difficult to detect due to multiple factors.
One factor was that scammers were now claiming to be from companies that did exist in reality, as opposed to older tactics of using fictitious companies, Menon said.
“The other reason these scams are difficult to detect is because it is widely-known that likes and views on social media platforms are, often, manipulated,” Menon said. “Hence, victims are unsuspecting and get lured easily.”
In the western city of Ahmedabad, Rohit Chawre had clicked on a WhatsApp message that promised him a steady parttime job – by rating films on an online film database.
Chawre, who worked a temporary job at a power plant, lost more than 1.13 million rupees. Most of it was money he borrowed from his mother, extended family members and friends.
In debt and with his job hunt yielding no luck, Chawre has taken a loan from a bank to repay the debt.
Shujaat Dutt, who did not want his real name used, lost nearly 250,000 rupees in December 2021 to cyber fraud. He has been trying to organise victims and raise awareness of these scams through a network of WhatsApp and Telegram support groups. Dutt said most victims were like him, and “needy”.
“I know victims who needed money desperately for their son’s medical treatment, or victims who wanted to fund their daughter’s marriage,” he said. “In some ways, all the victims have needs they were looking to fulfil.”
For Naresh Modi, that need was for companionship and a purpose in life.
In the nation’s capital of New Delhi, Modi, 60, a retired executive who worked at one of India’s biggest private firms as a senior manager, had led a lonely life since his wife’s death from cancer last September.
With his children settled in different cities, Modi thought the way to beat his loneliness would be a part-time professional role.
A WhatsApp message he received in early April looked like just what he needed, he thought then.
All he had to do was to rate hotels on a website called trivagorating.com, which Modi mistook for the popular travel bookings portal Trivago.
He lost more than 4.3 million rupees – his entire retirement savings – in three days.
“I felt like I had been hypnotised,” he said.