Take a moment to think about your day: How many things did you do online? Perhaps you made a call or two via WhatsApp. You definitely sent at least one WhatsApp text. You might have looked up a restaurant, office, or some other location online on Google Maps, perhaps run a Google search for some fact to use in a work email, and you may have used Gmail to send it. Later, you might have built a shopping cart on Amazon after spotting a brand while scrolling Instagram. Along the way, you may have forgotten to book that Uber to that destination you needed to go to, until a WhatsApp message reminded you – “Where are you?”

The point is, multinational technology companies or Big Tech are increasingly running our lives. We rely on these apps for many, if not most, of our basic tasks. And the result is that we trust them to give us the right information, get us connected to our loved ones at the right time, bring us our things securely, and even get us somewhere safely. That is a lot of trust placed in a very small group of private, profit-driven companies. What happens if they end up being incorrect? A lot of damage.

And it can happen to anyone. It happened to my partner and me.

To celebrate his birthday, my partner Vijay decided to host a small birthday party at our home. A celebration calls for drinks and snacks, and so we reached for our trusty neighbourhood “wine shop”, Seasons Wines, known in our area for a great collection of premium and imported wines and whiskeys. Now, ordinarily, we save numbers for all frequently contacted businesses. But for the last few years, Google has improved its search results for several categories with “cards” – a conveniently summarised panel of all information related to what you just searched for on it. In the case of a business, this card throws up its full name, address, Google Maps location, and even a helpful “Call” button linking directly to its mobile number. Lazy Millennials that we are, Vijay and I got used to merely searching the names of some of these local businesses on Google, and calling them from this top search result directly.

Vijay did what we always do: cranked up the Seasons Wine search result, pressed “Call”, and spoke to the guy at the counter. We were old regulars. “Hi, I wanted to order two bottles of red wine, one bottle of gin, one bottle of that new whiskey that you recommended that day, and then my regular six cans of that beer,’ Vijay instructed on the phone. I prompted him to order my favourite brand of gin.

“Yes sir, that comes to Rs 10,671. So please pay on Google Pay and then we will send the order,” a smooth voice said on the other end.

“Oh you want me to prepay? But usually, I use my credit card with the delivery guy,” Vijay said.

“Yes sir, but this is a big order. It’s over Rs 10,000. For these orders, we have started a new prepayment policy. Some customers don’t accept orders later and all that, you understand no, sir,” the man on the phone said.

I was listening too. Seasons Wine had never, ever asked us to prepay an order. But the argument made sense. We had never placed such a big order with them before either. Besides, it was Seasons! Our guy! We thought nothing of it and proceeded to Google Pay the entire amount on the contact number.

An hour passed. “Where is the alcohol?” I asked Vijay. “Everyone will be home in 30 minutes. Call them and ask.”

Vijay called back the number (we still hadn’t saved it!) “Sir, the order is ready, but because it is a big order, we need you to give your permit number,” the guy on the other side said.

Now my antenna was up. Seasons had never asked me that. Also, as a business reporter who had done stories on the alcohol business, I knew about the permit laws of Maharashtra. Something was wrong.

Every state in India has separate laws for alcohol. Some, like Bihar and Gujarat, have banned it outright.

Others, like Maharashtra, still run an archaic “permit” system, a hangover of the Prohibition era of the 1960s. Long story short, one technically needs a Maharashtra state government licence to have alcohol at home, even if it is a party among friends. But the on-ground enforcement of the law means that the onus of having that permit is on the liquor shop owner, not the buyer.

I took the phone from Vijay. ‘What is this permit?’

‘Ma’am, you have to pay Rs 25,000 for a Maharashtra government liquor permit, otherwise a one-time permit is Rs 1000,” the guy on the phone answered. “Otherwise, we will not be able to deliver the parcel to you.” The figures sounded right, but I now suspected we were being scammed.

“No problem, you don’t deliver it, I will come to pick it up myself,” I said. “Anyway, we have paid for it. I am coming to the shop.” Seasons Wine was just about 800 metres away from our apartment. I signalled to Vijay to go flag down an autorickshaw while I engaged with the guy on the phone. My mind was racing, and I was getting angry.

“No, ma’am, we are not delivering from the shop; all orders are being delivered from our godown,” the guy answered. “Okay no problem, where is the godown? I will come there and get it,” I answered.

Vijay and I were in an auto now, rushing towards Seasons Wines. I knew now that we had probably been scammed.

“Ma’am, entry is not allowed at the godown, you will need to pay for the permit,” the guy said.

I was furious now. I launched into the choicest expletives. “You better give me you ‘godown’ address, or I will dig up who you are anyway and then we will see who needs a permit for what,” I shouted on the phone. Click. The line went silent.

We were almost at our trusted Seasons Wine shop. I dialled again, but the call wouldn’t go through. The man had blocked my number. I went to the WhatsApp account he had messaged our “order confirmation” from. No messages went through. We were blocked, and apart from a phone number, we had no idea who this person was or where he lived. He may not even be in Mumbai or even Maharashtra. Was he even in India? I wondered.

Meanwhile, Vijay walked up to the friendly folks at Seasons Wine Shop. ‘Hey, I just called this number of yours and placed an order, but the guy on the phone keeps saying it is in some godown? Where is my order?’

The Seasons Wine guy looked at the number once and groaned.

“Arre sir! You too?” He pointed to a large, prominent notice on the front of the shop with that exact number printed in large, bold font. “So many customers have complained to us! We are tired of complaining to Google about this. Don’t call this number. This is not ours. You know us; we will never ask you to prepay any order, ever.”

And that was it.

There was nothing we could do, except perhaps lodge a police complaint. I had heard from friends and acquaintances how hard it could be to get the police to take cyber fraud complaints seriously. Besides, I reasoned in my head, we were at fault. We willingly transferred money to an account. Perhaps the police will say that, too?

I looked at Vijay, who looked as embarrassed and angry as I felt. What a crappy start to his birthday celebrations.

“Forget about it for now,” he said quietly. “Everyone will be home soon. I’ve placed another order, let’s just take it back home with us.”

We put the incident out of our minds. The liquor was great, the cake even better, and the house party, one for the books. Neither of us wanted to remember how we were scammed. It was humiliating.

And while losing Rs 10,000 wasn’t going to cripple us, it pinched a lot. I told myself that at least, the fake wine shop guys did not wrangle any more money out of us.

That night, I saw Vijay meticulously type out Seasons Wines’ correct phone number and save it. Meanwhile, I went to the Google listing of the business and left a review, warning others that the number listed on this business listing was fraudulent.

I wasn’t the only one: several others had left similar warnings, narrating the exact same story. We had simply never bothered to check.

Months later, as I began work on this book, I thought back to how and why we got scammed.

Our first mistake clearly was to trust the number listed on a Google search, instead of the one we have always called.

Why did we use Google Search at all, and not just save Seasons Wines number? I have thought about this question a number of times. I believe it was because searching for things on Google, like a Yellow Pages phone directory of the old times – had become a force of habit. The easy access to the internet in big cities has made us lazier, meaning the simple act of saving a phone number also feels onerous. There is evidence of more such lazy behaviour.

Big city users are ordering groceries, food, and cigarettes from their neighbourhood shop, even the ones in their very building, using apps, rather than just walking down the stairs! Comedian Sapan Verma joked about this very thing in a standup set in a video from February 2024. “This is too much privilege,” he jokes. “At some point Amazon should just give an error saying ‘No! Go down and buy it’,” he says about having a house broom shipped from another city via an online order.

Remember the fake loan apps masquerading as calculators that Babu Lal was fighting? They, too, rely on India’s public and private tech infrastructure to make it easy to take our money.

Scammers running fake loan apps know that Indians are quickly getting comfortable with making small online payments via UPI. When Babu Lal demonstrated one such loan app during our call, he explained how the scam in that case was to lure a victim into paying an upfront “processing fee”. On clicking the “Apply Now” button for a loan, the app redirected us to a UPI ID in the name of a fictional firm with a (presumably) very real bank account. Another was using a fake payment gateway – a web page that has a licence to process online payments through many methods including credit cards, net banking, and of course, UPI. “I tried to check the background on the domain name of some such payment gateways, but often these apps were linked to payment gateways with very new domains and unfamiliar names,” Babu Lal says. “It is likely this domain was made by scammers.” In fact, many of these fake payment gateways were designed to imitate the design, colour scheme, and overall look of India’s most popular payment gateways such as Razorpay.

Some experts from this space, including Babu Lal, blame the UPI payments system for making it much easier to scam people. Unified Payments Interface or UPI is the person-to-person payments infrastructure on which apps like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm run, allowing us to make online payments easily. This infrastructure was set up and is controlled by an Indian government-owned non-profit called the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

“The NPCI is launching countless features every year, all meant for transferring money from your account more easily,” Babu Lal says. “But in my opinion, they are simply giving enough features to scammers so they can use or exploit them. We call this tech innovation but it is not. You have created some kind of nuclear bomb. Yes, it can supply electricity but it is also radioactive.”

Babu Lal’s frustration is understandable. In November 2024, the Ministry of Finance presented evidence backing his concern. In the financial year 2023–24 (from April 2023 to March 2024), the number of reported UPI fraud cases had risen by a massive 85% to 13.42 lakh, the ministry told the Lok Sabha in response to a question raised by an MP. The total value of these frauds? Rs 1,087 crore, almost double from the previous year. What’s worse, these frauds aren’t slowing down. That same month, the ministry said that between April and September 2024, another 6.32 lakh incidents of UPI fraud had been reported, worth Rs 485 crore in total. That’s already 44% of the total amount of money people lost to these frauds the previous year.

In February 2025, the RBI went a step further; it launched two new domain names exclusively to be used by Indian banks and other non-banking financial entities called “bank.in” and “fin.in”. The logic was simple – scammers often spoof links to legit banks and payments apps, and such spoofed links are everywhere. A new set of domain names may prevent people from falling for scam links. But, how long before the scammers catch up!

Could be sooner than we think.

Excerpted with permission from Bharat Bluff: Inside the Cons of India’s Internet Revolution, Soumya Gupta, Roli Books.