Confessions of a call-centre scammer
is week, the BBC showed scammers at work in an Indian call centre, recorded by an activist who hacked into the company's security cameras. Staff were seen laughing at their victims in the US and the UK. But who are these scammers, and how do they justify their actions?
Behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, Piyush is telling me how he made a quarter of a million dollars.
"It was easy money," he says, detailing how he bought fancy cars and wore designer clothes.
From a modest background, Piyush made a fortune by defrauding innocent victims at the other end of a phone.
"To become a rock star we have to do something," he says.
"Become a thief?" I ask.
"Right," he replies coolly.
Piyush meets me in a friend's apartment, in one of Delhi's richest neighbourhoods. The group of young men I've come to talk to all have one thing in common - they've worked in India's scam call-centre industry.
The country is well-known for outsourcing jobs from Western countries to legitimate call centres, but there's also a thriving dark side.
For nine years after leaving college, Piyush was part of it. "I wasn't getting a job anywhere else and the money and the incentives were good," he says.
The company Piyush worked for ran what is known as a "tech support scam". It would send a pop-up to people's screens, telling them their computer had been infected by a "pornographic virus" or other malware, and giving them a helpline number to call.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51753362
= new reply since forum marked as read
