India is by far the largest poor country by population, it's reasonably advanced technically, and English is widely spoken.

It's no coincidence that the other country we often associate with scams, Nigeria, is also large and has many English speakers.

There are plenty of scams in (say) China as well, they just target Chinese speakers.

I get a ton of Chinese language scam robocalls in the US, they're just not specifically memorable because I don't speak Chinese.

> this question will appear insulting but do you think there is a cultural reason why there is so much scamming in India or by Indians? I've read many hackernews posts on Indian swe candidate lying on the take home test or CV. 100% of the phone scammers I encountered here in Australia have a South Asian accent.

It's not "cultural", e.g. here in Germany we have a huge problem with phone fraud originating in Turkey [1]. The reason why scams are so common for "foreign" countries is relatively simple: fraudsters need people speaking the language pretty well, but do not want attention from domestic law enforcement... meaning you need a remote country with a shoddy/easily bribable law enforcement, speaking the same language as the "target" country, a huge supply of desperate, poor people willing to turn to crime for money and easy ways to transfer money from the target country to the source country and back to wherever the ringleaders are. For English-speaking countries, the biggest country where these conditions meet is India and the Philippines (and historically, Nigeria), for German-speaking countries it's Turkey (with historically close migration links from the post-WW2 "Gastarbeiter" era).

[1]: https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/Betrueg...

I know few companies in India who for some amount would write essay, thesis for students. A large number of them are from US. These companies make very good money from them. Yeah everybody cheats, maybe westerns are very good at hiding it.