Cyber criminals are tricking you into parting with your hard-earned money by preying on your vulnerabilities. They come posing as law enforcement officers investigating serious charges against you or pretend to be a friend in distress who needs money urgently or lure you into clicking on dubious links online by promising high returns on investments.
The scale of these operations is staggering: according to a government estimate, Indians could lose Rs 1.2 trillion to cyber frauds over the next year. The data also suggests half of these scams originate in three countries: Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
Help us get to the bottom of this cyber scam epidemic. We want to send an investigative reporter to Cambodia to probe the criminal networks that have lured and trapped Indian workers, and are using them as cyber slaves to fleece Indians back home.
Our series will also tell you what you can do to protect yourself, and if you have been scammed, how you can seek redress.
More importantly, we will jot the dots to explain how a range of shifts in recent years have combined to create fertile conditions for these frauds, from rampant data leaks, abuse of Aadhaar, lack of digital privacy, political misuse of investigative agencies, a jobs crisis, and more.
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