The Scammer Next Door
November 12, 2025 at 03:30PMIn Snigdha Poonam’s essay for The Dial, excerpted from her book Scamlands, the reporter details her methods for infiltrating scammer circles and call centers in India. Poonam navigates “a complex and multilayered landscape of deceit”; her antagonists share the same false name, promise her the same bogus lottery winnings, and then offer her jobs deceiving others. Her complex portrait of “grassroots fraud” left me with a feeling of vertigo, as each new turn revealed some greater, evasive complexity.
As my conversations with Rana Pratap continued, he frequently questioned my sincerity about joining his lottery scam operation. Once, he petulantly remarked that he had encountered many women who only gave out false hopes. I carefully did not ask him to elaborate.
I kept him talking, hoping eventually he’d be comfortable enough to meet in person. The initial COVID-19 lockdown restrictions had been eased, allowing for socially distanced, masked meetings, but he was evasive whenever I broached the subject of meeting face to face.
Unexpectedly, one day, he called to abruptly end our discussions. Accusing me of wasting his time, he said, despairingly, that the only job I was suited for was washing his dishes.
He was calmer when I rang him a few days later. I came clean and told him my real name and my intentions. I said I was a journalist interested in profiling a KBC scammer. I asked if he would meet me for a proper interview. While he wasn’t offended that I had deceived him — though such a scenario would have been amusingly ironic — he expressed no interest in continuing our conversations, seeing no benefit in it for him.
I had one last question that I managed to get in. I had long been intrigued by what he called himself: Rana Pratap was a 16th-century Hindu king famous for resisting the Mughal Empire. I asked if it was his real name. He said it wasn’t. Then he ended the call.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/12/call-center-lottery-scam-india/
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