Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation? Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of.

Source: New York Times January 27, 2021 09:56 UTC