Why we Indians are such suckers for all sorts of conmen

The following has been written by Jug Suraiya for the Times of India.

Jug Suraiya is a prominent Indian journalist, author and columnist. He is best known as a satirist and columnist. Suraiya is a former editorial opinion editor and associate editor of the Times of India.

I would request everyone to read the last paragraph to understand the man's intelligence and foresightedness.

If you live in India and have an email id and/or a mobile phone, you must have got emails, or text messages, like this: Congratulations! You have just won an International Lottery of $1,00,000,000! To claim your prize send an advance fee for legal expenses and your bank account details to this number. Hurry while stocks last! Being a sensible person, chances are that you would ignore what is so obviously a scam, an attempt to cheat you out of the money in your bank account.

But what is surprising is how many of our fellow Indians fall for what have come to be called ‘Nigerian 419 scams’, or ‘Nigerian gold scams’, because they originated in Nigeria some 25 years ago and 419 is the section of that country’s penal code which deals with such crimes.

According to a Holland-based financial information agency, Ultrascan AGI, India leads the world in the number of people who fall victim to such fiddles: last year alone, Indians were defrauded of some $870 million by scamsters through AFF, or Advance Fee Frauds, which is yet another term for the all-prevalent Nigerian 419. AFF is a fast-growing industry in India, reportedly having registered a 20-fold increase in the past eight years. According to Ultrascan, there are almost 5,000 of such crooks operating within India, with Kolkata being a major hub.

Why are Indians so susceptible to such patent frauds? Indians rightly pride themselves on their native intelligence. After all, didn’t we invent the zero and revolutionize forever the world of numbers? So how come such numerically intelligent people like us are such suckers when it comes to being conned by all manner of scams?

For it is not just so-called ‘Nigerian 419′ — maybe that should be changed to ‘Indian 420′, considering the size of the desi imprint that has been put on it — that we so regularly and readily fall for. We put our faith — and , more importantly, our monetary donations in the form of ‘guru dakshina’ — in all kinds of self-styled ‘godmen’ and ‘babas’ who promise to cure us of all the ailments, physical, emotional, monetary, or any other that we suffer from. In all good faith, we are eager to believe in miracles and magicians, astrologers and palmists.

Why are we Indians so gullible, so easy to cheat and swindle? Part of the reason might be that we Indians, thanks to the nature of the circumstances common to us all, perforce have to be diehard optimists. Despite all experience to the contrary, we resolutely cling on to the belief that as bad as things are today, tomorrow they’ll be better. We have little choice but to put our faith in this credo. Because if we were to believe the opposite — that, as bad as today is, tomorrow is going to be even worse — we might as well give up the ghost, here and now.

Indians are the world’s biggest suckers, they’re the easiest to con because they’re the world’s biggest optimists. They have to be in order to cope with the hassles and hurdles of everyday life: no paani, no bijli, no school admissions, no end to corruption.

That’s why, in all good faith, we are such easy prey for scamsters. Particularly that special breed of scamsters we call netas. Achche din will come. Won’t they?