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A high-stakes cyber caper set in the heart of modern India
The Statesman Bhubaneswar
|July 17, 2025
Smarak Swain's The Scammer's Trail is an electrifying thriller reminiscent of the genre John Grisham has popularized—the legal thriller—but set in the digital age.
Smarak Swain's The Scammer's Trail is an electrifying thriller reminiscent of the genre John Grisham has popularized—the legal thriller—but set in the digital age. Swain knows how to hook a reader early, and he doesn't let go until the final chapter. It's an easy read, just like his last fiction The Hawala Agent.
The novel opens dramatically: the sprawling Bharat Institute of Medical Sciences (BIMS, seemingly located in the fiction where AIIMS is) is hit by a ransomware attack. Swain pulls the reader straight into the chaos, evoking the panic that ensues in a hospital stripped of its critical IT infrastructure. The stakes are real: not just medical data and government secrets, but reputations, careers, and livelihoods. Forced into a corner, BIMS capitulates by paying an exorbitant ransom in Bitcoins, but now India's LEAs are looking for the perpetrators.
This story is from the July 17, 2025 edition of The Statesman Bhubaneswar.
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