BENGALURU: As a standup comedian, I am used to calls from unknown numbers. The callers usually introduce themselves, bargain for a price, and then ask me to recommend other comics within the same price. So when I received a call from Mumbai, I thought nothing of it.
A gentleman on the other side informed me that a package containing MDMA was caught by customs at the Mumbai airport. I thought of all my friends in Mumbai – honest, hardworking, law-abiding citizens. It was only when the person asked me to switch on my video, did I realise that I was a part of the ‘digital arrest’ scam.
When the ‘Digital India’ initiative started, little did anyone know that Indians would come up with new digital ways to scam their countrymen. I have been no stranger to scams. If you are a curious youngster, the entire world is filled with scams of different kinds. I once bought an audio cassette of the film Jeans for 20 rupees.
The packaging was perfect, the cassette was sealed. I went home giddy with joy, and found that the cassette was a cheap knock-off. The audio quality was worse than my home’s AM radio, and led to much mocking among my friends. I once gave a lift to a Baba who blew into the air and seemed to materialise a black stone.
He rode with me to the ATM and took 200 rupees – the most I have paid for a stone. I have been asked to perform at shows but pay a ‘nominal’ amount to finalise the gig. I have bought ‘Nike’ shoes that survived exactly three days before they transformed into flip-flops. I have encountered tour guide scams, Ayurvedic scams, and e-mail scams.
I had read somewhere that email scammers purposely leave errors in their emails. If you notice them and ignore the mails, you’re not their target audience. But if you notice nothing fishy, you are ripe for them to scam. When I switched on my camera, I found a man dressed in a police costume. There were no stars on his uniform, but as a film critic – I could have given him a ‘1 star’ for his performance. His dialogue delivery seemed rehearsed – like a senior actor mouthing off the lines in a potboiler that he knows will be a dud at the box office.
When he began listing out my offences, I took a leaf out of our politicians’ book and replied with ‘No Hindi’. This threw him off balance, and he began to stutter and stammer. It was like watching a bad amateur theatre play. After a point, I began to laugh. The actor quickly suppressed a smile and quickly disconnected the call.
While I was amused by the entire experience, I wondered why Indians are so good at scamming. We have stock market scams, political scams, and even hi-tech scams. Perhaps it is the side-effect of our smartphone proliferation. Perhaps it is our ability to switch easily between languages. The only satisfaction I got was that I had wasted the scammers’ time, perhaps saving some innocent person from being scammed.
After I hung up, I wondered if the scammer was reprimanded by his boss for his substandard performance. Was he instructed to undergo some training in acting, with a special focus on improv? After a few moments, I was filled with a strange kind of empathetic silence. In offices, we are constantly scamming our bosses and colleagues. We save taxes illegally, and take wrong routes to cut corners and save time. Maybe we were all scammers, after all!
(The writer’s views are personal)