Books and Authors30 Okt 2025

Fraud, fear and loathing from Jamtara to Sihanoukville

"I wanted to use fraud as a way to look at our society today. We have a fraud underworld industry that employs multitudes. If you have such a large number of people who will readily go over to the ethically grey zone -- they join to help family and then they find there's no coming back -- they are an incredible asset not just for someone running a scam in India but anyone anywhere in the world who is trying to target any demographic. The story of fraud is the story of globalisation and to my mind, more vice versa. It's a workforce that has also come to the attention of these very sophisticated transnational scam cartels, proper cyber crime mafias from China. They can see that people can be very easily lured into migrating to some of the scam cities being set up in South East Asia where there is very little regulation and the political class is complicit. Those who are lured, some younger than 20, are kept in closed compounds and they could lose their lives if they refuse to scam. In India, decades of inequality has pushed some people to the point where they feel they have nothing to lose. It is a matter of survival. The human trafficking part of this is grisly and the truth is it's continuing at a very large scale."- Snigdha Poonam, author, Scamlands; Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World talks to Manjula Narayan about the scam ecosystem powered by a transnational workforce from low income countries that's leaving a trail of devastation from Delhi to Manchester, Texas and Melbourne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Avsnitt(348)

The Road to Zanskar

"Even in winter, twice a month, the first postmen in Zanskar in the 1980s climbed rock faces and crossed frozen rivers -- if you fell in, you could die -- in a journey that took three days, to deliver...

26 Mars 57min

Slow and steady wins the race

"The fossil fuel age gave us speed. This, on the one hand, allows us to think, 'I'm going faster', but it never defines 'faster to where, and to what?' You become a victim of speed -- always trying to...

20 Mars 54min

The quiet pull of the Pune police procedural

"The way I look at it, whydunnit is actually more important than whodunnit. There are only so many permutations and combinations you can think of in terms of whodunnit. It's finite whereas whydunnit i...

12 Mars 48min

A return to the land

"We went in with urban confidence and rural reality hit us in the face at every turn! Establishing a farm is probably the most difficult thing I've done. I think everybody should do it."- Arti Dwarkad...

5 Mars 54min

Using stick figures to demolish dubious politics, doublespeak and more

"You may try to believe that you are living in a First World country and that your reality differs from that of a poor person in your vicinity. But, at the end of the day, you will face the same exist...

26 Feb 1h 5min

A fight against forgetting

"Comics and literature allow us to enter worlds through our imagination; it is a medium of not-saying. We read because we want to get into the interior worlds of say, a family living in a room in Algi...

19 Feb 59min

A people willing to sacrifice their lives to save nature

"The Salman Khan story reached the headlines and people thought, well, if the Bishnois can go for him so effectively, it's not safe to poach there. It has actually reduced poaching. So many Bishnoi di...

13 Feb 55min

Jewellery: Of ornamentation and adornment

"I don't think you will find anyone in India who doesn't wear a piece of jewellery [of some sort]. The Amrapali Collection is a pan Indian one. The jewels in this book are worn by pastoralists, the ag...

5 Feb 52min