to the scammer’s computer and infect it with
his own software. Once he has done this, he
can monitor the scammer’s activities. Sitting
in his home office, L. is able to listen in
on calls between scammer and targets and
watch as the scammer takes control of a vic-
tim’s computer.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the
scammer’s webcam and is able to record
video of the scammer. From the IP address
of the scammer’s computer and other
clues, L. frequently manages to identify the
neighborhood—and, in some cases, the actual
building—where the call center is. When
he encounters a scam in progress, L.
tries to both document and disrupt it—
as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
Like L., I was curious to learn more
about phone scammers, having received
dozens of their calls over the years.
Sometimes during my interviews with
him L. would begin monitoring a call
between a scammer and a mark and let
me listen in. In some instances, I would
also hear other call-center employees in
the background—some of them mak-
ing similar calls, others talking among
themselves.
The chatter evoked a busy workplace,
reminding me of my late nights in a
Kolkata newsroom, where I began my
journalism career 25 years ago. When
scammers called me in the past, they fre-
quently had South Asian accents, leading me
to suspect that they were calling from India.
I had tried cajoling them into telling me
about their enterprise but never succeeded.
Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have
better luck.I
FLEW TO India at the end of 2019 hop-
ing to visit some of the call centers
that L. had identified. Although he
had detected scams originating from Delhi
and other Indian cities, L. was convinced
that Kolkata had emerged as a capital of
such frauds. I knew the city well, having
covered the crime beat there for an English-
language daily in the mid-1990s.
In my notebook were a couple of addresses
that L. identified as possible origins for
some scam calls. I also had the identity of a
person linked to one of these spots, a young
man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identi-
fied him by matching images and several
government-issued IDs found on his com-
puter. The home address on his ID matched
what L. determined, from the IP address, to
be the site of the call center where he oper-
ated, which suggested that the call center
was located where he lived or close by.
One afternoon, I drove to Garden Reach, a
predominantly Muslim and largely poor sec-The last word^37
Wi
kip
ed
ia
tion in southwest Kolkata. I was looking for
Shahbaz. The apartment I sought was in a
building at the end of an alley. It was locked,
but a woman next door said that the build-
ing belonged to Shahbaz’s family and that
he lived in one of the apartments with his
parents. Then I saw an elderly couple seated
on the steps in the front—his parents, it
turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s
brother, who said Shahbaz had gone out.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile num-
ber, but when I called, I got no answer.
Eventually, I pulled the brother aside and
told him that I was a journalist and wantedShahbaz told me that sometime around
2011 or 2012, a friend took him to a call
center, where he got his first job in scam-
ming. In his first few jobs Shahbaz earned
a modest salary—he told me that that first
call center paid him less than $100 a month.
In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a
group of scammers in Garden Reach, earn-
ing a share of the profits.
It was hard to ascertain how much this
group was stealing from victims, but
Shahbaz confessed that he was able to
defraud one or two people every night,
extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per
victim. He was paid about a quarter
of the stolen amount. The more we
spoke, the more I recognized that
Shahbaz was a small figure in the
gigantic criminal ecosystem of the
phone-scam industry, the equivalent of
a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee,
giving me guarded answers that were
less than candid or directly contra-
dicted evidence that L. had collected.
He was vague about the highest
amount he’d ever stolen from a victim,
at one point saying $800, then later
admitting to $1,500. I found it hard
to trust either figure, because on one
of his November calls I heard him bul-
lying someone to pay him $5,000. He
told me that my visit to his house had
left him shaken, causing him to realize
how wrong he was to be defrauding people.
And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
I knew he was not telling the truth. Two
days earlier, hours after our first phone
conversation, Shahbaz had been at it again.
It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to
swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn.
Before I came to see him for lunch, I had
already heard a recording of that call, which
L. shared with me.
L. told me that the access he had to
Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met
with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed
back to life about 10 weeks later. The IP
address was the same as before, which sug-
gested that it was operating in the same
location I visited. L. set up a livestream on
YouTube so I could see what L. was observ-
ing. The microphone was on, and L. and I
could clearly hear people making scam calls
in the background. It appeared that Shahbaz
had turned the computer on to download
music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it
seemed that he was taking a moment to chill
in the middle of another long night at work.Adapted from an article that origi-
nally appeared in The New York Times
Magazine. Used with permission.The Garden Reach neighborhood in Kolkatato meet his brother because I had learned
he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass
on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later.
He denied that he’d ever worked at a call
center. I persisted, but he kept brushing me
off until I asked him to confirm that his
birthday was a few days later in December.
“Look, you are telling me my exact birth
date—that makes me nervous,” he said. He
wanted to know what I knew about him.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj
Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d
chosen that as the venue out of concern for
my safety. When he showed up in the hotel
lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically,
Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short
and skinny, with a face that would seem
babyish but for his thin mustache and beard.
We sat down at a secluded table in the
hotel’s Chinese restaurant. I took out my
phone and played a video that L. had made
of a call in which Shahbaz was trying to
defraud a woman in Ottawa. On the call,
he can be heard threatening her: “You
don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his
chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s
yours, isn’t it?” He nodded in silence.