India's Scamdemic

Blackmail, threats of arrest and fake authority are being used to create an atmosphere of fear by local and global criminal networks using phones and computers to cheat unsuspecting Indians of their life savings amounting to crores

- By GAUTAM S MENGLE

“Rest assured, I’ll personally repay you the amount by EOD. I’m just caught in a meeting right now, so decided to shoot you an email,” the missive said.

The size of the amount was normal in Sharma’s corporate training business, and since it is a startup, financial rumbles from time to time were not unheard of. The wording of the email, too, was the right mix of casual and business-like, the way Sharma always discussed work related matters with Gaikwad.

As it happened, Gaikwad was facing something of a cash crunch himself and didn’t want to take the risk on that particular day. He replied to the email saying so, and received no response. He simply assumed that Sharma understood and didn’t expect her to waste time on formalities either.

Three days later, however, he received a second email from Sharma, asking if he was free to plan a ‘surprise’ for the team. Feeling guilty about the last time, he replied in the affirmative and the next email from Sharma asked him to purchase some gift cards as a Diwali bonus for the team.

“That was the moment alarm bells went off in my head, because I’d heard of these scams, where the cybercriminals ask you to buy gift cards for them. I immediately checked the email ID and saw that while the display name was Sharma’s, the actual email ID was completely different. Due to the fact that I received numerous emails from her in the past, I didn’t bother checking the email ID earlier. This time, I went back to her previous mail which, I realised, had also come from a different ID,” Gaikwad recalls.

Immediately, he alerted Sharma who, by the time, had received similar warnings from other business associates. The question that had everyone wondering was this: Since Sharma was being impersonated, clearly her email had not been hacked. How, then, did the scamsters know whom to email? The answer is in LinkedIn.