In 2018, Snigdha Poonam authored one of the best non-fiction books written in India in recent times. Her “Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World” is a collection of vivid reports from the smaller Hindi-speaking cities of North India where young men & women grapple with lack of employment opportunities and yet nurture intense ambition and cultivate this ambition with no small amount of courage. This long read in The Guardian is an excerpt from that book. Ms Poonam describes how lack of legitimate employment opportunities is forcing young Indian to work in call centres where their job is to scam unsuspecting people around the world.
The article begins by describing how Ms Poonam is interviewed, recruited and then trained by one such scam operation in the capital city of India: “…while scanning jobs websites one day, I saw the ads: a mix of keywords that seemed designed for the ambitious young jobseeker: “International BPO. Zero years’ experience. 40% ENGLISH required. ONE-DAY training. Fast CAREER Growth – a LIFE is what you make.” In 2017, a call-centre job at a BPO (a business process outsourcing company) doesn’t have the appeal it did a decade or so ago. The industry has lost value over the years because of poor oversight, and competing markets including the Philippines and US prisons. But it’s still a job.
At the bottom of such job adverts is the name and number of an “HR”, a middleman between a jobseeker and a placement agency. One day, a colleague and I called one of them. The middleman wasn’t interested in knowing anything about us – he simply told us to expect a text message after the call, and to follow the instructions. The text invited us to an interview at a recruitment office in west Delhi, where we were supposed to hand over the code at the bottom of the message.”
Ms Poonam explains that the youngsters who are recruited to work in these scams don’t initially realize that underlying reality of what they are signing up for: “One young man we met that day, Pradeep Saluja, left the building thinking that he was about to start working in customer service for Amazon, as the job ad had promised.
When I called him a month later, Saluja told me that the job had in fact turned out to be in a small office with a strange name, in Gurugram. He was given a script to memorize and asked to get on the phone, along with 50 other “executives” of a similar age.
The job was easy, he said. All he had to do was call people in the US from a list, introduce himself as Charles, and tell them they were under federal investigation for tax evasion. One out of 10 people would freak out, he said. At the first hint of panic in their voice, Saluja told them he was going to transfer the call to a different department, where one of his seniors would help them pay their taxes through an online money transfer.
Saluja didn’t like the company’s work culture: the hours were long and the targets unrealistic. He quit the company after three weeks and went back home.
So you were working for a call-centre scam, I suggested to him. “You could say that,” he said. He told me it wasn’t a terrible gig for someone truly in need of a job.”
Even more interestingly, inspite of the desperate need for employment, some of the youngsters work in these scam operations are actually tipping off the authorities – including those in USA – about what is going on in these call centres: “Six months before I met Saluja, the police raided a seven-storey call centre in Mumbai and arrested hundreds of youngsters for posing as officers of the US tax office and cheating people out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Two months before the raid, two employees of the call centre had contacted the Federal Trade Commission in Washington to tip them off. I spoke to one of the whistleblowers, 19-year-old Pawan Poojary, on the phone. He hadn’t always hated his job, he told me. He had joined the company knowing he would be a scammer. He was a college dropout looking for a way to make “lots of money”. One day he got a call from an HR who had seen his resume on a jobs website and thought he was perfect for a job.
After Poojary came in for an interview, the company appointed him as a “closer”, the person to whom an “opener” such as Saluja passes on a call after the introduction. The salary was 15,000 rupees (£175) a month, plus incentives. “Whatever I made in dollars in one call, I would be paid twice the amount in rupees,” Poojary told me. In other words, he kept less than 1/30 of the take. He says he was asked to come for training the next day.
The trainer started by asking the 10 new recruits if they had heard of the IRS. He spelled it out for them. Everyone shook their head. “Then he explained that we were going to call Americans [pretending to be] the IRS,” Poojary told me. “The moment he said this, I knew something was wrong. I asked him: ‘Is it a scam?’ He said it was, and told us that if anyone had a problem, they could leave. Only two people left.” The remaining eight were given a six-page script.”
Ultimately however Ms Poonam’s writing is so compelling because it shows us how lack of opportunities is turning bright, hardworking, aspirational Indians into cybercrooks without a conscience:
““Many people started crying on the phone,” Poojary told me. When that happened, he would ask them to drive out to their nearest department store and buy an Apple gift card worth hundreds of dollars. He would then transfer the call to a senior who collected the code on the back of the card.
Poojary loved it. “I was having so much fun,” he told me. And he was good at it: in just two months, he “earned” $24,000 for the company. He was thrilled at his ability to scam Americans, who, according to his friends and colleagues, considered themselves superior to the rest of the world. Like most young employees of the company, he wanted to live it up like the mastermind of the scam – a 23-year-old man who drove luxury cars, owned big houses, travelled business class and dated beautiful women. On his birthday, Poojary was given 50,000 rupees (£580) in incentives. “I blew it all immediately,” he said.
But by the end of the same week, he decided he couldn’t do it any more. “I was on the phone with an American lady from California or Texas. I told her the script. She started crying. She said she had no money, that she was about to go to a food bank to get her son something to eat…
“In Delhi, you can’t become an important man without pulling some kind of fraud,” Sunil Kumar, a recruiter for scam call-centres, told me with a smile.”
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