The financial barrier to starting an Indian “call center” is not very high. For $15,000, an experienced franchiser can help you find a suitable floor in a black-glass office building, wire it with dozens of computer stations, and train a fleet of ambitious, English-speaking graduates to perform telecom fraud. You can usually recoup your investment within a month or two.

Revenues flow in dollars, payroll and other expenses in rupees. The local police will be a nuisance-level operating cost at worst, with the risk of arrest — never mind prosecution — vanishingly slight. Paranoia can be managed by remembering the name of Samarth Bansal, who penned an exhaustive Hindustan Times exposé of Delhi-area scam centers, only to receive a single text message in response: a thumbs-up emoji from a colleague.

More than a decade into India’s rise as a phone scam superpower, fraudulent call centers still thrive across the subcontinent. Scamming is now a mature industry whose growth, like food and alcohol delivery, exploded exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, India-based scam syndicates defrauded Americans out of more than $10 billion. More than $3 billion of that was siphoned from the accounts of ninety thousand Americans aged sixty and older. This is a sixfold increase from the $500 million seniors lost to scammers in 2021, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center — the fastest growth of any age group. But even these numbers may be lowball estimates. Authorities admit they’re scrambling just to keep up with the most elusive and fast-evolving adversary in international crime.