Phish pond
A sleepy little district in northeastern Jharkhand has emerged as an unlikely hub of cyber crime in India.
Next time you get a call from "the ATM headquarters" or the "SBI main branch" seeking your debit card details, ask: "Are you calling from Jamtara?" The caller may not respond, but the answer most likely is yes. This back-of-beyond district in eastern Jharkhand is at the bottom of the pile among computer-literate regions, populated by poor farmers, and the homes get barely five hours of electricity a day. Yet, some hundred villages here have emerged as a frenzied phishing industry hub.
Thousands of calls are recorded daily at the cellphone towers near these villages. Calls are made to random numbers in search of gullible victims, who will share their debit or credit card details with the "bank official" and end up with money flying out of their accounts.
A few months ago, the caller from the "SBI main branch" could have been Sitaram Mandal, 24, matriculate, unemployed, now in jail and yet a hero in Jamtara district's Sundorjori village. Sitaram made his last phishing call on a sultry Sunday evening in May. He was doing a dry run for the benefit of a couple of wide-eyed young followers in the village, showing off his skills when the police swooped down.
Sitaram's modus operandi was simple. Make random calls to a series of numbers from a SIM acquired through a fake ID. Have a companion stand by with another phone on which the details of ATM/debit cards and the OTP are filled in. Money from the account is transferred into an e-wallet and almost immediately out of it. One phone call, a few minutes and the young men were several thousand rupees richer.
In 2010, Sitaram, the unemployed son of an unemployed father, had travelled to Mumbai in search of work like many other young men from Jharkhand. He worked at roadside eateries, as a tout at a railway station and finally at some call centres, where his life changed forever. Sitaram returned to Jamtara in 2012. Four years later, local police say Sitaram has Rs 12 lakh in his account (now frozen), two concrete houses (both painted sunrise yellow), a Mahindra Scorpio SUV, and his two sisters have been married off to wealthy grooms. They recovered seven smartphones and 15 SIM cards from Sitaram and his associate Vikash Mandal. The IMEI numbers (15-digit unique identity) of their mobile phones matched those provided by police from several states in complaints about phishing calls that had been traced to cellphone towers in Jamtara.
But in one of India's poorest states, where there are few opportunities for young people, Sundorjori residents see Sitaram as a worthy son. The dozen police cases of fraud don't bother anyone. "Parivar ke liye mehnat karta hai, kya galat hai? Baahar to nikal hi jayega (He works hard for his family, what is wrong in that? He will eventually come out of jail)," is a common refrain. While the cases pan out in court, Sitaram in Jamtara jail is equally nonchalant. "Sab jhooth hai (All lies)," he says with a shrug. Mandal is a legend now, a sort of Amitabh Bachchan of cybercrime, say the police. But he is only one of hundreds of Jamtara youth who are believed to have taken up phishing as a career.
PHISHING AS COTTAGE INDUSTRY
No one seems to know when the young people of Jamtara district started phishing. The lore goes that some young men who went to Delhi got involved with an online racket called 'Chehra Pehchano' (recognise the face). People were asked to identify mildly blurred images of Bollywood stars for a reward. Gullible victims called on the numbers given and were asked to pay a processing fee so that they could get the gift they had won-an SUV. Once the money had been credited to the account number provided by the fraudsters, they stopped taking the victim's calls. Police say a few youth involved in this racket returned to Jamtara and were the first ones to begin phone phishing. Gradually, more and more youngsters were drawn to it.
Jamtara has 1,161 villages and most of the population depends on rain-fed farming except in about a hundred villages. "The cops have zeroed in on these villages where phishing seems to be the only industry," says Ajay Kumar Sinha, officer-in-charge at the Karmatand police station, part of the jurisdiction along with Narayanpur, where most of these villages are located. Since April, the two stations have got over 150 notices from police in 16 states with requests to find one fraudster or another. Jamtara SP Manoj K. Singh points to the runaway construction in villages in the Karmatand station area. The villagers are flush with illegally acquired cash, he adds.
Kalajhariya village, which has a mobile tower that gets 2,500 calls a day, and Dudhania with its flashy new pucca houses are cybercrime datelines in Jamtara. As our vehicle rolls into Dudhania on a mid-summer Sunday in the last week of June, we come across village women dancing to Bollywood tunes belting out of massive loudspeakers. The celebrations peter out as we approach. The villagers don't want to talk to us. They blame the police and journalists for spoiling a party that had continued undisturbed from 2011 to 2014, when the police made the first arrests. "Baat hi nahin karna hai ji. Koi baaharwala nahin chahiye (We don't want to talk at all. We don't want any outsiders)," says a man in his forties. The womenfolk give us hostile looks.
The police focus on Jamtara, incidentally, has all to do with Pappu Mandal, 22, a high school dropout. A resident of Kasitand village, some three kilometres from Karmatand, Pappu has two pucca houses in the village today. But in November 2015, he made the mistake of calling up Kerala MP Premachandran, posing as a Reserve Bank of India official. He duped Premachandran of Rs 1.6 lakh. But greed ultimately got the better of him, as Pappu kept calling the MP. "Once he succeeded in hoodwinking me, he kept calling asking for OTPs. I diverted the calls to Delhi Police, who cracked the case. But I am yet to get back the money he swindled," says Premachandran. Pappu is now cooling his heels in jail.
Triveni Singh, an officer in Uttar Pradesh Police's special task force, says almost 90 per cent of the transaction-fraud-related calls made in the state were traced back to Jamtara. Telangana police chief Anurag Sharma posted a warning on Facebook on January 30, alerting people to be wary of Jamtara fraudsters. "We have had policemen from all over the country travelling to Jamtara in the past 3-4 years," says SP Manoj Singh.
On July 1, the West Bengal Police arrested Saddam Hussein, 32, deputy mukhiya of Jamtara's Sonabad panchayat for defrauding a Kolkata man, Shankar Kumar Bose, of over Rs 1 lakh. Hussein spoke fluent Bengali and persuaded Bose to share his ATM card details over the phone. The man's position in the village shows the level of acceptance cyber criminals have in Jamtara, says a senior administrative officer. The Jamtara police has arrested over 100 people in the past six months for phishing offences but the calls keep going out. So next time you get that call from "the ATM headquarters", remember, it could be yet another phishing attempt from Jamtara.