Internship season is a time when urgency can easily become a weakness. Final-year students are applying everywhere, class groups are full of links and screenshots, and every other conversation seems to be about who has landed what. Under that kind of pressure, due diligence often gets replaced by a desire for faster progression.
Bhoomika (name changed at request) was in her final year when a recruiter reached out about a paid operations internship with a Bengaluru-based startup. The message looked polished, the stipend was attractive. The joining timeline was quick as well, which she was glad for. Nothing about it felt random, or off.
“It didn’t feel strange at all at the time. Honestly, I was just relieved to finally have something in hand,” says the 2025 graduate. The caller knew where she was from and where she studied — a private engineering college in Tumakuru district, “only 70 km away”. She asked the kind of questions any HR executive would ask, and followed up by sending Bhoomika a document carrying a letterhead and signature. Trust was built slowly but steadily, with the recruiter respecting the rhythm of a real hiring process. By the time money entered the conversation, it felt like part of the process, not a deviation from it. The amounts were small enough to pass without panic. An application fee of ₹400. ₹1,500 for ID verification. ₹1,800 for registration and onboarding material. ₹4,000 as a “refundable” laptop deposit. And, finally, another ₹299 as a processing fee. Taken together, they drained about ₹8,000. “If they had asked for one big amount upfront, I would have walked away. By the time I realised something was wrong, I had already paid,” Bhoomika says.
Across India, student-facing scams rely on the same underlying mechanism: urgency, credibility, and payments routed outside official systems. In Delhi last year, a parent paid ₹2.3 lakh in cash after being promised a management-quota seat, only for the “consultants” to disappear once admission lists were released and no seat materialised. Earlier this month in Karnataka’s Gadag, students were lured with scholarship offers, given ₹2,000 each to build trust, then asked to open bank accounts and hand over passbooks, ATM cards, and SIMs. Their accounts were later used to move fraudulent funds without their knowledge.
Remember: no genuine college, employer, scholarship body, or training programme should need your money before it has properly verified itself to you. The moment a payment enters the process, slow it down. Call the organisation using the number on its official website. Check whether the person has a real company email, not just a name and a display picture. Do not rely on the contact that approached you to prove its own legitimacy. If money has already gone, act fast. Save the chats, keep the receipts, alert your bank, and file a complaint through the cybercrime system and the police.