India’s Cross-Border Cyber Scams Against the US and the West

India has become one of the largest global sources of cross-border cyber scams. Its significance extends well beyond the economic losses involved. Research from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur estimates that Indian call-center fraud causes approximately $10 billion in annual losses worldwide, with victims concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Cryptocurrency “pig-butchering” schemes inside India alone exceeded $3.6 billion in losses in 2024, and losses directly traced to India from U.S. victims between 2023 and 2025 reached $42 million – only the traceable fraction. Geographically, the Indian scam landscape shows a dual-track structure. A decentralized rural track, epitomized by the Jamtara–Mewat crime belt, accounts for the bulk of the crime. Bharatpur in Rajasthan records the nation’s highest cybercrime rate at 18 percent of reported cases; the Mewat region spanning Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana accounts for 11 percent, and these areas, together with Jamtara, source roughly 80 percent of the country’s cases. The Mewat model requires no technical skill – only a phone and a bank account – with operators as young as 12 and more than 500 new scams launched daily. Four criminal methods dominate the industry. Technical support scams, the most iconic export of Indian cybercrime, involve operators impersonating Microsoft or Apple staff, manufacturing fake “virus” or “account intrusion” alerts to lure victims into granting remote access before draining their bank accounts. As FBI Agent Jeremy Capello has observed, the core mechanism is manufactured technological panic. Government-agency impersonation sees scammers posing as IRS, Social Security, or immigration officials, demanding payment to “clear the charges.” A 2022 U.S. District Court indictment in the Northern District of Georgia revealed multiple Indian call centers routing tens of millions of such calls to American consumers. A newer “digital arrest” scam, in which scammers brandish fake police uniforms and forged warrants on video calls to demand transfers, is now expanding overseas: over 92,000 victims were identified inside India in 2024 alone. Behind these methods lies a sophisticated infrastructure. The networks route SIP-protocol VoIP calls through multiple servers to obscure their origins, rely on roughly 850,000 mass-purchased “money mule” accounts opened with false Know Your Customer or KYC documents, and move funds across borders through the hawala underground remittance system and cryptocurrencies. An analysis by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) of more than 15,000 IP addresses found some masterminds based in Southeast Asia while Indian personnel handle calling and account operations – evidence of a cross-continental division of labor. What makes the Indian case distinctive, however, is the grey connection between the scam syndicates and the political and institutional system. In economically backward areas such as Jamtara and Mewat, cyber scams have become a main source of household income, and local politicians protect voters – and thereby protect votes. Randheer Singh, a member of the legislative assembly of the Bharatiya Janata Party for Jamtara and a former minister, stated in a recorded interview that he frequently has to “make recommendations” to the police to secure the release of arrested voters, threatening to surround the police station if his constituency’s residents are harassed. The arrangement provides scammers with “electoral asylum” without legislators ever participating in the fraud directly. Institutional complicity extends into the banking and telecommunications networks the scams depend on. In January 2025, Hyderabad police disclosed that a 60-year-old woman had lent her NGO’s bank account to a scam network for a commission of $201,100. When police sought an arrest warrant, ten lawyers appeared in court to defend her. In February 2025, Indore police documented a father-son pair from an Islamic seminary lending their institution’s accounts for a 50 percent commission. “Ghost SIM cards” provide another conduit: by November 2024, Indian authorities had blocked approximately 669,000 cybercrime-linked SIMs, and Hyderabad’s “Operation Octopus 3.0” in May 2026 seized 1,194 SIMs issued under the identities of ordinary citizens—and even the deceased. These vulnerabilities are compounded by a structural failure in law enforcement. Police from across India flock to Mewat and Jamtara to arrest suspects, while local forces keep almost no record of proactive enforcement against scam dens in their own jurisdictions. A 2024 UNODC report identified “selective inaction” by police in high-crime areas as a core driver of the networks’ expansion – a pattern that functions as structural protection without requiring proof of individual bribes. This model contrasts sharply with Southeast Asia, where Cambodia and Myanmar feature direct participation by political and military elites and “nationalized crime.” Instead, India exhibits passive protection by local councilors and grassroots police, vote-driven patronage and a state often simply unable to conduct effective crackdowns. The U.S. has borne the deepest damage. According to the FBI’s IC3 2025 report, American fraud complaints surpassed one million in 2025 for the first time, with total losses exceeding $20 billion, up from $16.6 billion in 2024. Losses from technical support scams, a major Indian-origin category, climbed from $807 million in 2022 to $1.464 billion in 2024, reaching approximately $2.1 billion in 2025. Victims are highly concentrated among the elderly: in 2024, victims aged 60 and older filed 147,000 complaints totaling $4.8 billion—29 percent of all national cybercrime losses. U.S. law enforcement has responded with a series of crackdowns. A 2024 joint FBI operation gainst Indian transnational call centers produced 215 arrests, a 700 percent year-on-year increase. In February 2025, Indian-American operator Hitesh Madhubhai Patel was sentenced in Texas to 20 years in prison and nearly $9 million in restitution. In a February 2026 case in Maryland, three Indian call centers were shown to have caused $48 million in losses to more than 650 victims. Other Western countries report similar losses. Australia’s reported fraud losses rebounded to $1.57 billion in 2025, up 7.8 percent from 2024, with victims aged 65 and older losing $71.7 million in 2024—the highest absolute loss of any age group. In Canada, reported fraud losses reached $461 million in 2024, but with a reporting rate of only 5 to 10 percent, implying true losses of $4.34 billion to $9.18 billion. Government-impersonation scams are among the fastest-growing categories there, with India as the primary source country. In the United Kingdom, tech-support scams rank among the fastest-growing fraud types, while the absence of European-level data specifically tracking India-sourced scams remains a monitoring gap. Beyond the economic costs, the hidden damages are substantial. Elderly victims in particular suffer severe psychological trauma: anxiety, depression, social isolation, and self-blame. The systematic impersonation of government agencies erodes public trust, as seniors grow wary of legitimate communications from bodies such as the Social Security Administration. Because the targeted elderly victims are frequently the holders of lifetime savings or intended inheritances, the scams also disrupt intergenerational wealth transfer. Ultimately, India’s scam industry is driven by the synergy of “employment substitution” and regulatory arbitrage: a large population of educated, English-fluent, underemployed youth provides a continuous labor supply for scam call centers, and in areas lacking formal jobs, fraud has become a “career choice” with its own social-reproduction logic. The grey connections between syndicates and officials represent an economy-driven patronage embedded in a democratic electoral system – an institutional failure of state capacity rather than the proactive criminalization of the state seen in Southeast Asia. Joint operations such as the FBI–CBI Chakra series deliver short-term wins, but as long as rural underemployment and local electoral patronage persist, they remain “whack-a-mole” tactical successes.