Jamtara - The Phishing Capital of India

"Education is important. Without proper education you would have to take up low paying professions." These are some of the statements that we hear from our families. Well, this is not truly the case in the district of Jamtara in Jharkhand. With the basic knowledge of technology, school and college dropouts conduct small to major monetary frauds.

BY HARSHIT GUPTA | 5 Mins Read

We often receive messages from our banks stating that none of their representative will ever ask us our passwords, pin numbers etc from us. Technological Crime has developed into countless forms until now. One of them is Phishing a.k.a. Vishing. Vishing is calling people under the disguise of a reputed company in order to obtain sensitive information from the person like credit or debit card numbers, passwords, pin numbers etc. This information is then used to extract money from the person's account. Well, if we ever receive any calls, demanding such information, there is a great chance that it may be coming from the small, rural district of Jamtara in Jharkhand.

Mostly rural, Jamtara has an area of around 1800 sq. km. and resides 800,000 people in it. However, the phone network traffic and the standard of living of the people disregards its low population and poverty status. Dubbed as the Phishing Capital of India, Jamtara has emerged as a hub for phishing scandals. Jamtara district is often frequented by police from different States. According to the reports at the Karmatar police station, between April 2015 and March 2017, police teams from 12 different States have visited the station 23 times and arrested around 38 accused. Over 80 cases have been registered suo motu by the Jamtara district police between July 2014 and July 2017 against 330 residents of the area. At Karmatar police station alone, the number of arrests in 2017 has crossed 100. According to reports, in 2017, 80% of all vishing complaints originated from the district of Jamtara. One major case was of August, 2019, when a group from Karmatar managed to fraudulently withdraw Rs 23 lakhs from the account of Punjab MP Preneet Kaur, wife of Punjab's Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh. The group managed to get her account number, ATM Pin, CVV and an OTP. Then, through an SMS, she realised that her account was debited by ₹23 Lakhs.

Now, how do they carry out their operations? The scammers from Jamtara call people impersonating banks, telling them that their ATM card has been blocked due to a new government policy. The scammers play around the fear of getting arrested or loss of money of the victims which make them giveaway their PIN number, CVV and other information to rectify the made up problem. Following this procedure, the scammer asks the victim to add a certain number to their password PIN and ask about the new password. Then they subtract that certain number from the new password to get the old password. After getting the information, the scammers purchase goods, transfer money and so on. 

During the demonetization period, the scammers from Jamtara made a fortune as more and more people fell in such traps, driven mainly by fear of non-compliance of government rules. They had almost ₹1 lakh to ₹2 lakhs dropping in two cards alone. 

Even recently, three people were arrested from Mumbai, who were native to Jamtara after a complaint was filed by a man saying that he lost ₹1.7 lakhs to a phishing racket. The crime was conducted using TeamViewer, an app that allows one device to view another device's screen on the first device. The amount was used to purchase vouchers of Croma and Big bazaar. The police recovered the money and 70 cell phones that the accused had purchased using the money.

Recently, Netflix released a series on these phishing incidents by the name of "Jamtara- Sabka Number Aayega". The writers were intrigued by a news article on Jamtara and decided to make the series. They even conducted ground investigations to delve more into the lives of the people of Jamtara. 

It is surprising that such rackets are being conducted by young men from small rural areas and really makes us think whether the "Digital India" revolution heading towards a wrong way.