People are often ignorant or careless while dealing with such callers and that’s what makes them gullible. If you don’t know which mobile application the caller is asking you to download on your phone, then don’t download it just because he/she is claiming to be a bank official. I know about an IAS officer who gave remote access to his phone to a scammer. ‘Greed and lust is why people fall prey to these crimes so often’ Mukesh Choudhary, a cyber expert and advisor to Jaipur Police, says, “It doesn’t matter whether a person is educated or illiterate, people often end up sharing sensitive details with callers because they don’t verify. Jamtara only came to the attention of the police when the amount extorted or number of cases became too big to ignore. How Jamtara became the cybercrime hub Cyber experts say that such phishing scams originate from smaller towns where the police are not that active or are not able to deal with these criminals, unlike in metros, where police departments keep track and conduct raids related to these crimes.

As Trishant Srivastava, writer of the show Jamtara – that captured the place’s homegrown phishing industry – puts it, “These crimes have become so common, that now people say ‘mere saath Jamtara ho gaya’.” Lately, new Jamtara -like hotbeds have also come up in Haryana, UP, Gujarat and Rajasthan. What the above cases have in common, is that the person receiving the call lost a huge sum of money, and that most of these calls can be traced to one region – Jamtara in Jharkhand.

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