Not a day goes by without hearing of someone known getting scammed online. The amounts involved vary, but the stories have a similar ring. A voice on the phone asks you for an OTP or for some identity details and before you know it, your bank account is lighter by a considerable sum. You click on a link unsuspectingly, and your phone is cloned. In so many cases, it is virtually impossible to figure out what one did wrong.
To top it all off, the protection available to ordinary citizens is almost non-existent. Overworked and overwhelmed cybercrime units shrug their shoulders and express their inability to get ahead of the scammers, and govt seems to have no interest in taking any note of the problem.
The older and the digitally unschooled face the brunt of this problem, since they struggle to comprehend a completely new way of being. But even the educated and the digitally adequate are not spared. Calls from the Customs department for an alleged drug shipment with your name on it, threats of jail from ED, a cryptocurrency opportunity that seems too good to pass up—the stories of well-educated people who in theory should know better getting scammed are legion.
What these scams point to is the fundamental unease we have with having an entirely new universe with a completely different ecology being thrust upon us. On the face of it, we can navigate our way smoothly, marvelling at the convenience available to us at the click of a button; we follow a sequence of steps that we have learned to perform in the digital arena. But the moment something goes wrong, our disorientation at having all our foundational concepts—time, space, money, identity—getting redefined spills out in the open.
The problem is that what the digital world has done is to infiltrate the minutiae of our everyday life—paying bills, buying groceries, booking tickets. Unlike hardware-oriented technologies of the past, where the shock of the new was limited to learning how to operate the new gadget, here one must reinvent one’s entire mode of being.
When television arrived in Indian homes, or when landlines became commonplace, the learning curve was gentle, the risks minimal. At worse, a person unfamiliar with the new thingamajig would be unable to use it. Today’s digital misstep can empty bank accounts, steal identities, or compromise entire networks of relationships.
The anxiety manifests in curious ways. Watch a group of middle-class Indians discuss their latest encounter with digital fraud, and you’ll notice how these conversations have become our new ghost stories—cautionary tales shared over dinner, each more elaborate than the last. Like all good ghost stories, they serve a social purpose, creating a shared vocabulary for our collective fears.
There is a constant sense that we are doing something wrong; there is a small sense of relief when any transaction is successfully concluded as if we have passed one more test. This provides fertile ground for scammers to exploit our inherent tentativeness. They insert themselves into the cracks of our doubts, shifting shape as their methods evolve. They understand that in this new world, even the most cautious among us are perpetually off-balance, never quite sure if we’re following the right protocols or breaking some essential rule we didn’t know existed. What makes it easier for them is that a lot of crimes go potentially unreported. There is a sense of shame inherent in getting tricked particularly for people who think of themselves as being educated and worldly-wise.
It helps that the digital bureaucracy enables this by requiring an endless succession of compliances—we need an Aadhar card for everything, even entering a building, and every few months we are required to update our KYCs as if in this period we have somehow magically turned into someone else. So, when a voice on the phone tells us confidently that we have messed up, we believe them.
In a short period, we have dismantled the trust markers of the physical world—the granite facades of banks, the official letterheads, the face-to-face interactions that allowed us to read intent and character. The digital world offers its own pale versions, all of which can be cloned or stolen. It is not just that we don’t know who to trust, but that we don’t even understand what distrust means anymore. In a society like India, where so many business transactions have been based on trust and personal relationships, losing these markers can turn out to be devastating disruptions.
In the midst of all this, one must acknowledge the heroism of the ordinary who has despite all the challenges learnt to adopt this new way of life to a substantial degree. The vegetable vendor who masters QR code payments, the grandmother who learns to video call her grandchildren, the small-town entrepreneur who builds a digital presence—each is performing a small miracle of adaptation.
The scam is like a glitch in the matrix—when we can catch a glimpse of the terrifying disorder that lies hidden beneath the seeming order of a shiny new world. It creates a fleeting experience of cognitive vertigo when we suddenly realise that our money is just data that can be manipulated, where our identity is a thin construct that can be stolen or hijacked, and that our sense of security and well-being is largely illusory.
We live in two worlds that have two different operating systems. On the surface we are doing the same things that we have always done—connect with people, buy things, store money, look for good deals, but digital reality is a thin veneer of order that rests on assumptions that are invisible to us. We find this out the hard way. Scams point to that moment when we understand that technology, however advanced, is a poor substitute for society and its institutions.
santosh365@gmail.com
Not a day goes by without hearing of someone known getting scammed online. The amounts involved vary, but the stories have a similar ring. A voice on the phone asks you for an OTP or for some identity details and before you know it, your bank account is lighter by a considerable sum. You click on a link unsuspectingly, and your phone is cloned. In so many cases, it is virtually impossible to figure out what one did wrong.
To top it all off, the protection available to ordinary citizens is almost non-existent. Overworked and overwhelmed cybercrime units shrug their shoulders and express their inability to get ahead of the scammers, and govt seems to have no interest in taking any note of the problem.
The older and the digitally unschooled face the brunt of this problem, since they struggle to comprehend a completely new way of being. But even the educated and the digitally adequate are not spared. Calls from the Customs department for an alleged drug shipment with your name on it, threats of jail from ED, a cryptocurrency opportunity that seems too good to pass up—the stories of well-educated people who in theory should know better getting scammed are legion.
What these scams point to is the fundamental unease we have with having an entirely new universe with a completely different ecology being thrust upon us. On the face of it, we can navigate our way smoothly, marvelling at the convenience available to us at the click of a button; we follow a sequence of steps that we have learned to perform in the digital arena. But the moment something goes wrong, our disorientation at having all our foundational concepts—time, space, money, identity—getting redefined spills out in the open.
The problem is that what the digital world has done is to infiltrate the minutiae of our everyday life—paying bills, buying groceries, booking tickets. Unlike hardware-oriented technologies of the past, where the shock of the new was limited to learning how to operate the new gadget, here one must reinvent one’s entire mode of being.
When television arrived in Indian homes, or when landlines became commonplace, the learning curve was gentle, the risks minimal. At worse, a person unfamiliar with the new thingamajig would be unable to use it. Today’s digital misstep can empty bank accounts, steal identities, or compromise entire networks of relationships.
The anxiety manifests in curious ways. Watch a group of middle-class Indians discuss their latest encounter with digital fraud, and you’ll notice how these conversations have become our new ghost stories—cautionary tales shared over dinner, each more elaborate than the last. Like all good ghost stories, they serve a social purpose, creating a shared vocabulary for our collective fears.
There is a constant sense that we are doing something wrong; there is a small sense of relief when any transaction is successfully concluded as if we have passed one more test. This provides fertile ground for scammers to exploit our inherent tentativeness. They insert themselves into the cracks of our doubts, shifting shape as their methods evolve. They understand that in this new world, even the most cautious among us are perpetually off-balance, never quite sure if we’re following the right protocols or breaking some essential rule we didn’t know existed. What makes it easier for them is that a lot of crimes go potentially unreported. There is a sense of shame inherent in getting tricked particularly for people who think of themselves as being educated and worldly-wise.
It helps that the digital bureaucracy enables this by requiring an endless succession of compliances—we need an Aadhar card for everything, even entering a building, and every few months we are required to update our KYCs as if in this period we have somehow magically turned into someone else. So, when a voice on the phone tells us confidently that we have messed up, we believe them.
In a short period, we have dismantled the trust markers of the physical world—the granite facades of banks, the official letterheads, the face-to-face interactions that allowed us to read intent and character. The digital world offers its own pale versions, all of which can be cloned or stolen. It is not just that we don’t know who to trust, but that we don’t even understand what distrust means anymore. In a society like India, where so many business transactions have been based on trust and personal relationships, losing these markers can turn out to be devastating disruptions.
In the midst of all this, one must acknowledge the heroism of the ordinary who has despite all the challenges learnt to adopt this new way of life to a substantial degree. The vegetable vendor who masters QR code payments, the grandmother who learns to video call her grandchildren, the small-town entrepreneur who builds a digital presence—each is performing a small miracle of adaptation.
The scam is like a glitch in the matrix—when we can catch a glimpse of the terrifying disorder that lies hidden beneath the seeming order of a shiny new world. It creates a fleeting experience of cognitive vertigo when we suddenly realise that our money is just data that can be manipulated, where our identity is a thin construct that can be stolen or hijacked, and that our sense of security and well-being is largely illusory.
We live in two worlds that have two different operating systems. On the surface we are doing the same things that we have always done—connect with people, buy things, store money, look for good deals, but digital reality is a thin veneer of order that rests on assumptions that are invisible to us. We find this out the hard way. Scams point to that moment when we understand that technology, however advanced, is a poor substitute for society and its institutions.
santosh365@gmail.com
