Anatomy of a grifter: Jitu from Jharkhand

Editor’s note: In her new book Scamlands, journalist Snigdha Poonam uncovers the seedy empire of scamsters—from phishing scams in Jharkhand to insurance frauds in Assam and investment scandals in a temple town in Tamil Nadu. In the following excerpt, a gifted young conman, Jitu, offers her an alarming lesson in how the ‘dhandha’ works—and an insight into what they do and why they do it.

This excerpt from Scamlands by Snigdha Poonam has been published with the permission of Penguin Random House India. 

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Even India’s Parliament was talking about Jitu’s methods. In 2019, a member of parliament from Santhal Pargana, Nishikant Dubey, delivered a speech highlighting the proliferation of mobile phone scammers as the biggest threat to Narendra Modi’s vision of digitizing India’s economy. ‘A ticking time bomb,’ he called it, although he went on to suggest the scammers were controlled by India’s ‘enemy nations’. It was terrorism, and he demanded the immediate establishment of a special unit of India’s counter-terrorism agency in Deoghar. Jitu had heard Dubey’s speech; he laughed it off, like most of his friends and associates.

With rising awareness about digital privacy, each new scam proved to be a race against time. While the police and journalists unravelled one deceptive scheme, the scammers were busy inventing the next.

When digital transfers first began gaining ground in India, the Reserve Bank of India linked them tightly to authorizations sent to mobile phones through one-time passwords, or OTPs. The RBI’s restriction was proving increasingly difficult to undermine: it was getting harder to trick people into sharing their OTPs. The village gangs strived to bypass this massive hurdle standing between them and strangers’ bank accounts.

‘In this line of work, you can’t afford to lag behind by a single day,’ Jitu pointed out. He discovered it firsthand when the last big idea materialized. ‘Last year, I had left the village to attend a wedding elsewhere. When I returned the next day, all the boys were glued to their phones.’ Jitu spent all night catching up.

‘This bank had just started a special credit card for its customers. They all belonged to the same series, meaning the initial numbers on each card were identical. If we added any random five numbers after that, it would turn out to be in use by a customer. Those ten digits acted as their user ID on the bank’s mobile app. We downloaded that app and entered the number. The app asked for an expiry date. The year of expiry was the same for all owners of this limited-series card. The month had to be between January and December. We tried until we hit the right answer. The next thing the app needed from the user was a four-digit secret PIN.’

This was his favourite part. 

‘Guessing the PIN is the simplest aspect of the [phishing] scam. Most people go for convenience rather than safety while selecting numbers on their keyboards to craft a PIN. You’d be surprised at the number of people who set 0000. Those who believe they are smarter will choose numbers in a row or go for a pattern that is easy to remember: 2580, 2589, 3698 . . . What’s convenient for them is convenient for us.’

Jitu turned to look at me in the backseat. ‘I am telling you this so that you don’t make this mistake.’ I glanced down at the phone in my lap, feeling foolish. Should he use one of his go to patterns, he could unlock my phone. With another one, my banking app. I set a reminder to change the codes that night as he went back to the story. 

‘Once we are inside the app, we have all the information we need. The user’s name, his address, etc. Using that, we make an account in his name on e-commerce apps. First, we make many expensive purchases—and then we cancel them, directing the refunded money to his bank account. We are already inside his banking app, so we can transfer the money to ourselves.’

This is all they did for the next two days, working day and night. By the end of that period, so many cards had been hacked that the bank cancelled the entire series. ‘No sweat. In those two days, I made between Rs 30 and 40 lakh.’ At 2021’s exchange rate, that would be almost $50,000. ‘It was a thrilling time.’

At times like this, making money seemed to be the easiest thing to do. ‘What is a crore but a hundred lakh? What is a lakh but a hundred thousand? Making Rs 1 lakh is as easy for a cyberchor as spelling it out. If we are having a good day, we can make Rs 50,000 sitting under a tree.’

Even as he cheated strangers, speaking to them on the phone, creating their shopping baskets offered him glimpses into their lives—and how different those lives were from his own. On the other end of the line, many of his victims lived in bustling cities, worked in air-conditioned offices and indulged themselves in luxuries from the world’s marketplaces. In truth, some would have really struggled to reach where they were— perhaps a few had even known the sting of poverty. Yet, he suspected that few truly understood what it meant to be trapped in one’s circumstances, no matter how fiercely one fought to rise above them.

This, however, wasn’t the justification he and his accomplices gave themselves for stealing money from those better off—even if only slightly. Their motives were rooted in a far more cynical belief: if they didn’t claw their way toward a better life, no one else would do it for them. And if others suffered along the way, that was simply the inevitable collateral damage of trying to wrestle free from the iron grip of fate.

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Scamlands by Snigdha Poonam has been excerpted with the permission of Penguin Random House India.