The article confounds cybercrime and the IT industry.

People working out of offices in Indian cities are not criminals since they work for legitimate businesses; the concentration of scam operations in said cities is not related to the presence of the IT industry, nor would scammers allocate resources inefficiently by buying office space, which isn’t required to run a criminal enterprise and may be detrimental by way of drawing attention and scrutiny which would have been avoided otherwise.

(Downvoters may want to address the problems with my comment; although I feel this is an issue which people feel strongly about, so a rational analysis is often foregone in the pursuit of vindication.)

My understanding of scammers in India has been formed by Youtube videos, where the host "scams the scammer", and from the Reply All podcast (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nh3wk).

Saying that scammers do not buy office space doesn't seem correct. Are you saying they wouldn't buy (or lease/rent) office space? If so, the Youtube videos and Reply All directly contradict that.

Even "mobs" operated as legit businesses. Agreed, to suggest some of the criminals would not attempt the same ruse is nieve.

Some rich businessmen in India are implicated in these scams as well. That is, they operate legit businesses on the whole, but, say, have a floor in a high rise of theirs that’s a scammer call center.

Could you please share any sources or references that support your argument?

Mark Rober's video mentions co-location of scammers with legit business, naming them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsLJZyih3Ac&t=320

From what I've seen of every phone scammer case they're in an office and look like a normal call centre.

why can't these talents just find normal jobs

Most of these crimes hardly require talent. It's just social engineering the tech illiterates or even the unsuspecting literates.

> Another finding in the report was that of all reported cyber crimes in India, almost half (47.25 percent) involved Unified Payments Interface (UPI) fraud. Debit, credit card and sim swap fraud came in a distant second place with 11.27 percent. Overall, financially motivated crime accounted for 77.41 percent of incidents.

Talented criminals are rare. And those talents mostly go behind bars while the above criminals loom at large.

and they pay is usually better than other companies

easy to get in, low skill requirements, good pay

you forgot one big thing in your list. the downside, which imo outweighs the benefits. being a criminal.

Less of a problem when corruption is rampant and you can pay off the police.

And the upside can be enormous. There's a huge amount of very poor people in India. For example only a few years ago everyone finally got a toilet in their house. Stealing $500 from a slightly demented grandma that is afraid about her medical insurance "running out" can be a lot to them.

Yeah, but it's not $500. It's frequently people being tricked into transferring huge chunks of their life savings to the scammers. Like 5+ figure sums.

just the free markets at work

there's a distaste on this one but this is mostly social psychology at work.

there are things people will do to provide for themselves and to improve their quality of life as long as they get away with it.

hell, it can be equated to online copywriters of fake fat loss pills and cosmetic products, people buying identities, vpns, ad accounts.

wherever you go there's always someone tryna take advantage of the sucker in the room.

god i love people, haha.

If you watch some of those "scammer gets scammed" videos you can see what the scammers actually think about the grandmas they're stealing from.

Not necessarily getting scammed, but getting a bit of what they deserve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsLJZyih3Ac

That will always depend on how good of a criminal you are. Whatever you do; don't be greedy.

These "employees" are usually led to believe "Everyone in the west is rich, it's fine to take a little from them"

this is so true, good lord.

i heard it first hand.

For everyone else who is wondering what the other 22% are: https://www.futurecrime.org/cyber-crime-research

Perhaps class?

If software developer talent is distributed across all classes of society but only the upper classes have access to professional or well paid technical jobs, there will be a surplus of low class tech workers shut out of the legal job market. So they resort to crime.

Cannot help but admire how western armchair experts readily attributes caste and class to every problem in India. This is equivalent to saying all the white folks in the US are rich. It's not that easy or that black and white (pun intended). The biggest driver of social mobility is the economic status as is in every other country. Coming from a wealthy background opens a lot of doors. There are a lot of filthy rich folks who are from the "lower" class and there are dirt poor folks who are from the "upper" class. Really looking forward to the caste survey/census being planned after next year's elections. Though I suspect the political class will either try to delay it again (as has been done multiple times before) or manipulate the data to suit their narrative.

> The biggest driver of social mobility is the economic status as is in every other country.

This is a key component of class.

The commenter didn't say anything about caste.

Sorry, I don't think class/caste is exclusively an Indian problem, notice I didn't use the caste term that is normally used in India?

Even though people in the West think we live in a classless society, Western society really does have classism, but it often is confused with race.

Class is a human problem.

Class/Caste has 0 relevance to this problem.

I think people that say something has zero relevance without any evidence are desperate to hide the truth.

well poverty is the most common theme on this one.

being a person of color or being a low rank caste member doesnt necessarily make you an asshole by birth, but poor living conditions and peer pressure makes you wanna say yes to immoral ez money things. it sucks.

Unbelievable how someone can have such a distorted view

As an intelligent and hardworking low class person living in Canada, I feel that I often bum into a glass ceiling.

Thanks for downplaying my life experience. Maybe next time, try to engage without totally dismissing peoples feelings!

Could you please elaborate on how you have hit the glass ceiling? I don't know much about workplaces in Canada. I can speak about India: at least in software, class does not play much of a role. Factories and older domains have more rigid hierarchies. Government offices and family-owned businesses are are especially notorious for this. There are other glass ceilings which vary from office to office. For example, smokers or drinkers could form cliques where crucial workplace politics gets discussed. Thankfully, the software industry has been a good equalizer for two reasons. Quite a lot of the bosses have worked in Western environments that were not so obsequious. It's easier for a solo developer to prove himself, especially after the work-from-home trends began.

As someone coming from a low class family, living in an underdeveloped country, I concentrate my attention on what's positive.

Imagining a glass ceiling will only undermine my efforts and confidence.

If you look around, I am absolutely sure you will find positive things that Canada provided and keeps providing you that 90% of the kids in my country can't even imagine.

Focus on that. Build confidence. Think that you can break this "glass ceiling". It's in your mind, bro.

As about intelligence and hard work, I think it's up to the people around us to judge ourselves and the results of our work. We need to understand others and be useful to them. That's how we can grow.

To me, it seems you have a mindset that is limiting yourself, making you feel sabotaged by others. This prevents you from learning what you need to do in order to improve and grow.

You might not like what I said. I might be wrong. You might ignore it. Anyways, those are the most honest, hard earned 2 cents I can offer.

Your are right, and I focus on what I can control to improve my life, but I am not ignorant of the struggles I face or the advantages of others.

I’m being realistic not a victim.

Did this realistic view provide you with any good results or advances in the aspects you aspire for your life?

If you can objectively convince yourself that yes, with real examples, that's great for you.

If not, maybe this realistic view is just distracting you or undermining your capacity.

For instance, people in first world countries have a lot of advantages over what I have, but I don't care. Occupying my mental capacity with that doesn't help me advance in life.

Instead, I focused on what's positive. For instance: people in first world countries created the internet, published freely available learning resources and open sourced amazing software. With all of that, I learned English (with help of pirated movies/series + subtitles -- published by first world citizens) and taught myself to code. With these skills and a few years of focused work, I now have a standard of living relatively close to a first world middle class family. That's an amazing feat in my social context and I don't care that people in first world countries get that more easily. It doesn't matter to me. Perhaps I'm even happier than they are, because the struggle makes me value even more what I have now.

Could you please share any sources or references that support your conjecture?

I don't think it's an unresearched topic here is the result of a quick Google search... https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...

But my comments are based on my personal and family life experience.

This article is about the classes lower on economical ladder where the education is expensive. In India in contrast, 1) education is not expensive, 2) has reservations for the classes considered lower on economical, caste/community, gender scales. So this conjecture does not hold true because of the ground realities. Scammers are criminal elements who want to make a quick buck like everywhere else in the World and there are plenty of options available for deserving candidates, based on talent, qualifications and relevant experience, and definitely not on their background.

Really asking, what do software developers have to do with dudes at a cyber cafe engaging in social engineering?

Impunity

Cyber crime usually targets external countries and it brings money in to the local economy, so little incentive for the government to target it

Same as hackers in Russia having impunity as long as they're not targeting USSR countries

Sure, but I think the country's image suffered greatly as a result. In contrast to Russia, I can hardly imagine that the country's leadership doesn't care.

India is a federal country. There are various layers of federal, state, local, and municipal governments and enforcement you need to peel through to crack down on stuff like this, especially if an operation ends up partially co-opting the state and local portion, or if the state and the federal portion are opponents of each other.

The Indian version of the FBI can't operate in states without their explicit permission, and there have been multiple cases where state police will end up arresting each other because competing politicians in neighboring states would file motions against each other. For example - https://m.timesofindia.com/india/explainer-inter-state-polic...

> country's image

abstract terms with no implications

Compare that with solid $ figures: if there's 1B in cyber crime money flowing to India per year split by 100k workers

that's $10k/year each, double average salary in india

Same like Russia, there can be a lot of complaints about Russia, but everyone still buying oil from Russia

It does care. Folks like PaywallBuster here are just posting their pet opinions as facts without actually checking their assertions. Indian police regularly work with the U.S. FBI.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/international-cyber-...

I can post 2 dozen such bust-ups in the last few years alone. The problem is that India is large nation with a humongous internet-growing population and the Indian police are still far behind their western counterparts. Also, compared to the FBI, the Indian CBI lacks teeth.

I'm pretty sure Russian hackers target former USSR countries. Estonia and Ukraine come to mind, but I would imagine all of the Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova would be ok as well.

There was an article about this -https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick... . Basically, malicious programs will not target hosts that have Cyrillic or other languages of Russian aligned countries.

There have been a ton of attacks originating from Russia against Ukraine and Estonia very publicly. Read Sandworm for a deep dive. Just because some hackers are lazy and use a Cyrillic keyboard as a lazy man's geofencing does not mean these countries are off limits.

[delayed]

I read a lot of James Bond novels, so I can imagine what goes on...

More likely hackers in Russia can avoid prosecution as long as they don’t target Russia’s allies (not all exUSSR countries are) and work for state agencies when asked (blackmailed).

There was a fantastic conversation in the leaked chat logs from the Conti/Trickbot groupings where one of them asks if they will be putting on their “young pioneer hats”, and other chats referencing being given tasks by the security services.

The machine translation of those chats and internal read me docs from Russian to English resulted in some hilarious loss of nuance - sentences like “removing the admins eggs” (which is idiom - eggs meaning balls, and more so meant subverting the admins privileges).

"Cyber crime usually targets external countries and it brings money in to the local economy, so little incentive for the government to target it"

A lot of baseless speculation here considering that the Indian police regularly work with the FBI to bust up cyber-crime - and this is regularly reported. Could you please offer some evidence to support your allegations ?

From my side: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-and-delhi-police-...

https://theprint.in/india/delhi-police-busts-international-c...

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cbi-operation-target...

Well, just read the article

India is a hot spot for cyber crime and scam call centers

Sure you can read articles about apprehensions every single day, but India is a big country, arresting 10 people every day makes no difference if there's (imagine) 100k people in the industry at any given time

Hard to get these jobs.

Something others are forgetting to list, many of these "criminals" are themselves being exhorted or trafficked.

Could you please share any sources or references that support your point?

Here is a report from the UN on forced criminality.

https://www.unodc.org/roseap/uploads/documents/Publications/...

The report is for Southeast Asia, but the same may apply for India too.

Indian Subcontinent is geographically, culturally, and demographically extremely different from Southeast Asia.

So the underlying/fundamental UN doctrine and principles should somehow be different?

You should still be able to glean the overall UN position on similar practices.

Whether you intended or not; your comment came across slightly xenophobic. 2 out of 3 main points (UN stance, forced criminality) are on point and shouldn't change based on the geographic region. Your comment read as if you were offended that the same pointsfor SE Asia could ever apply to India.

I hope not though. Either way it's important to acknowledge higher(meta) level perspectives for what they actually say, not who they're about.

Thank you.

I think you are right but the hook is not captivity, but rather simple drug and vice addiction

Anecdata of 4 call centers, yet no one in this video really seems like someone that being exhorted to do crime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsLJZyih3Ac

I know a guy in a country who has many friends doing this.

Scamming a Westerner can be worth a year’s pay even if they net a few thousand dollars. Whereas the legitimate jobs pay far less.

It also requires less skill to try as a lot of it is social engineering.

> It would be like a report that says "25% of financial crime in the US comes from New York City"

Boy do I have the project for you: https://thenewinquiry.com/white-collar-crime-risk-zones/

My little project suffered a bit from this as well: https://www.power-map.io/ Although zooming into the capital still yields useful info.

I was not sure how you concluded that "A lot of cybercrime comes from India".

But looking through the same lens as the example you provided, it makes sense that since 1.4 billion people stay in India, it is natural for the volume of cybercrime to be high.

> It would be like a report that says "25% of financial crime in the US comes from New York City"

Yes, and it would interesting to know for lot of people. I wouldn't mind T-shirts with NYC :: BFC front and on back BFC expanded to (Big Financial Crimes).

I think the definition of cyber crime is what is important here.

I think there are huge buildings with call centers in India dedicated to cyber crime. Thousands of people. Nothing to do with tech skills.

Here is Mark Rober basically bringing the war to their shores with incredible pranks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsLJZyih3Ac

I think you have a misconception of where cybercrime truly is concentrated in India. I think its more in the villages, some of which actually organise "crash courses" for youth that wish to make a career out of this [1].

Personal anecdote but I've witnessed cybercrime being done in various towns in some of India's biggest states, and they attract youth that would otherwise have been working in their family farms, etc.

>youth that wish to make a career out of this [1].

and your link for 1?

Oops, sorry for not including the link. I could've sworn I'd included that in. Anyways here's your link: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/nation/story/20160808-cyb...

And before anyone says such towns only account for a small proportion of all cybercrimes, the Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba has himself acknowledged that this one town alone was responsible for more than half of all cybercrimes (where the fraudster was posing as a bank manager) [1]

[1] - https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/01061...