Fraudsters Inc

BOOK REVIEW

- PROSENJIT DATTA

In the prologue of Snigdha Poonam’s second book, four successful Asian-origin American ladies are meeting for lunch at a restaurant in Boston, one winter afternoon in 2023. They are trying to rebuild their devastated lives. All four had fallen prey to cyberscams and lost hefty fortunes. Cindy, Lily, Michelle and Wendy were all victims of scammers who specialised in targeting professionally successfull, older women of Asian origin in the United States. The scam had spread like wildfire through the US, trapping

thousands over the period of a couple of years. The investigators of the scam would name it the Pig Butchering Scam. The victims were lured in through text and chat messages, and the scammers would spend a lot of time assiduously wooing them and earn their confidence.

The narration in the prologue is reminiscent of the dinner that Stephen Bradley organises for the three other victims of Harvey Metcalfe’s scam in Jeffrey Archer’s Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. But the resemblance is fleeting — Snigdha Poonam has her own strong narrative style and the scams she tracks are even more interesting and have a larger geographical footprint than the one recounted in Archer’s fictional masterpiece.