Rahul Mukherjee

Rahul Mukherjee is Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media and Director of the Cinema and Media Studies program at University of Pennsylvania. Rahul’sresearch on environmental media and mobile phone cultures has been published in his recent monographRadiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty(DukeUniversity Press, 2020) and in journals such as Media, Culture & Society and Asiascape: Digital Asia.

Title and abstract:

Jamtara’s Mobile Phishing Scammers: Rural Mediations in “Digital India”

Rahul Mukherjee (Penn CIMS)

The rise of “Digital India” discourse has also accelerated so-called “cybercrime” in the country. For the “Media Rurality” workshop, I will be focusing on a particular case-study of mobile phone phishing scam in the state of Jharkhand in India. Unemployment looms in Jamtara as the region lacks industrial growth and without rainfall, agriculture suffers. Rural unemployed youth of Jharkhand’s Jamtara district impersonate as bank officials and call customers in cities, and ask for their card details, explaining that they require those details to offer the valuable customers particular gifts. Such credit cards scams based on mobile phishing (vishing) have become rampant. In the vacuum of joblessness that exists across vast areas of India, and that has existed in Jamtara for a long time, the 3G (and in some cases, the 4G) cell tower has made its entrance for some time now.

In the earlier decade (2000-2010), such phishing scams involved call center operators in cities like Pune or Gurugram impersonating as Social Security officers calling citizens in United States as they worked from older data left behind in India by offshore companies. The incidences of cybercrime today are no longer mostly about targeting foreign nationals, but urban Indian citizens, and the calls no longer originate from a call center in Gurugram or Mumbai, but from rural hinterlands (Mahadevan 2020). Based on my interviews with locals, cultural producers, and journalists covering the area, opinion is divided in Jamtara about whether these youth are aspiring to be entrepreneurs through this phishing activity or whether they are just engaging in a new kind of crime (cybercrime). Furthermore, cyber criminals no longer operate out of cyber cafes or call centers, but from open fields with mobile phones. Being on the move on a motorbike or calling from the shade of bamboo huts helps the rural scam callers to evade being detected by cybercrime-investigators who try to monitor cell tower signals and communications.

In manipulating (or pirating) the operative logics of the telecommunication and digital finance infrastructures, Jamtara’s scammers (like Jamaica’s lottery scammers or Nigeria’s “419” frauds) participate (or insert themselves) in “domains of capital and technology from which they were often thought to be excluded before” (Lewis 2020: 93). While the crew from Jamaica would make international calls to United States’ citizens impersonating as officers of the US credit claims commission, the Jamtara scammers’ calls were made to Indian cities pointing to the rural-urban geographic and socio-economic inequities existing within India. The mobile scammers also devised innovative ways to direct cashless money to (erstwhile unused elderly people’s) digital bank accounts (Jan Dhan accounts). The different uses of Jan Dhan accounts and the ways in which scammers created alternative monetary distribution systems indicate that informal piratical practices cannot be eschewed away from the formalization of finance through digitization. The mobile phishing scam also points to how infrastructural mediations in rural areas can create new entanglements with and alternative circulatory pathways for urban media formations.

Lewis, Jovan Scott. 2020. Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mahadevan, Prem. 2020. “A Social Anthropology of Cybercrime: The digitization of India’s economic periphery,” Research Report on Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. April 2020. https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/India- Cybercrime.10.04.web_.pdf