Each Jamtara phishing gang paid local police 350 000 rupees a month

Preneet Kaur, a former member of parliament and the wife of a former Punjab chief minister, answered a call from a man introducing himself as the manager of the bank branch where her salary was credited. Her account, he said, had been marked dormant and her KYC needed an urgent update; she was in a rush, handed over her card details and the one-time password, and within minutes 2.3 million rupees had left her account for 28 others, 21 of them held by a single Gurgaon company.

The trail led east to Karmatar in Jharkhand, where police arrested Ataul Ansari, a local leader of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. A raid on his house produced 700 SIM cards and 20 handsets. Ansari confessed to having robbed a former IAS officer in Madhya Pradesh and a senior Oil and Natural Gas Corporation official; his fraud earnings, meanwhile, had been flowing into his legitimate business as a road contractor under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, a contract terminated after his arrest.

These cases come from a new book of investigative reporting, surveyed by Scroll.in, on how the Jamtara district became India's phishing capital. What emerges is less a conspiracy than a supply chain: callers who work the phones, mule accounts that receive the money, cash-out networks that empty them. Kaur had not been chosen — the callers hit her number by chance — and the trade carries local prestige: Ansari, the book records, wielded considerable influence within his own sphere.

Enforcement adapted to the industry rather than the other way around. Local Jamtara police routinely showed leniency toward cybercriminals, and when they received advance word of out-of-state teams coming to make arrests, they quietly warned the gangs. It took the police two years to grasp the scale of the activity. Their answer was not a crackdown but a retainer: each local gang paid the force 350,000 rupees a month.

The arrests that do happen fall on individuals. Pappu Mandal, an Ansari aide who took 150,000 rupees from Premachandran, an MP from Kerala, was tracked through his phone for a week and picked up on the outskirts of his village — after policewomen posing as members of a prospective bride's family discovered he was not at home. Seven hundred SIM cards in one house and 21 receiving accounts at one company describe an industry, not a lone operator.

The Jamtara police opened their investigation into the Kaur affair, the book notes, because the victim was a member of parliament.