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The scammers gaming India's overcrowded job market
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/02/the-scammers-gaming-indias-overcrowded-job-market
As competition for jobs among India’s youth intensifies, the offer of a lucrative career in a call centre can be difficult to turn down – even if the work turns out to be operating a scam.
In mid-2017, a few months after I had moved to Delhi to work for a national newspaper, I began to browse job websites. Every other day, an Indian news report underlines the gap between jobs and jobseekers. In 2016, in one municipality, 19,000 people applied for 114 jobs; among those competing to be a street sweeper were thousands of college graduates, some with engineering and MBA degrees. In the same year, more than 1.5 million people applied for 1,500 jobs with a state-owned bank, and more than 9 million took entrance exams for fewer than 100,000 jobs on the railways.
Faced with this lack of opportunity, many turn to rioting. Within months of returning to full-time reporting, I had covered two large urban youth revolts, in which entire cities had been shut down as people demanded quotas in education and jobs – today, young people from agricultural castes want to work in offices and not farms. I wondered what other options were open to them.
Then, while scanning jobs websites one day, I saw the ads: a mix of keywords that seemed designed for the ambitious young jobseeker: “International BPO. Zero years’ experience. 40% ENGLISH required. ONE-DAY training. Fast CAREER Growth – a LIFE is what you make.” In 2017, a call-centre job at a BPO (a business process outsourcing company) doesn’t have the appeal it did a decade or so ago. The industry has lost value over the years because of poor oversight, and competing markets including the Philippines and US prisons. But it’s still a job.
At the bottom of such job adverts is the name and number of an “HR”, a middleman between a jobseeker and a placement agency. One day, a colleague and I called one of them. The middleman wasn’t interested in knowing anything about us – he simply told us to expect a text message after the call, and to follow the instructions. The text invited us to an interview at a recruitment office in west Delhi, where we were supposed to hand over the code at the bottom of the message.
As competition for jobs among India’s youth intensifies, the offer of a lucrative career in a call centre can be difficult to turn down – even if the work turns out to be operating a scam.
In mid-2017, a few months after I had moved to Delhi to work for a national newspaper, I began to browse job websites. Every other day, an Indian news report underlines the gap between jobs and jobseekers. In 2016, in one municipality, 19,000 people applied for 114 jobs; among those competing to be a street sweeper were thousands of college graduates, some with engineering and MBA degrees. In the same year, more than 1.5 million people applied for 1,500 jobs with a state-owned bank, and more than 9 million took entrance exams for fewer than 100,000 jobs on the railways.
Faced with this lack of opportunity, many turn to rioting. Within months of returning to full-time reporting, I had covered two large urban youth revolts, in which entire cities had been shut down as people demanded quotas in education and jobs – today, young people from agricultural castes want to work in offices and not farms. I wondered what other options were open to them.
Then, while scanning jobs websites one day, I saw the ads: a mix of keywords that seemed designed for the ambitious young jobseeker: “International BPO. Zero years’ experience. 40% ENGLISH required. ONE-DAY training. Fast CAREER Growth – a LIFE is what you make.” In 2017, a call-centre job at a BPO (a business process outsourcing company) doesn’t have the appeal it did a decade or so ago. The industry has lost value over the years because of poor oversight, and competing markets including the Philippines and US prisons. But it’s still a job.
At the bottom of such job adverts is the name and number of an “HR”, a middleman between a jobseeker and a placement agency. One day, a colleague and I called one of them. The middleman wasn’t interested in knowing anything about us – he simply told us to expect a text message after the call, and to follow the instructions. The text invited us to an interview at a recruitment office in west Delhi, where we were supposed to hand over the code at the bottom of the message.
Interesting read on how and why people get into scamming.
Making people believe they are the real victims encourages them to victimize others. You can either be a victim and stay poor, or you can be a victim and make some unearned money and feel like a winner.
People are willing to do monstrous things to other people if they feel it is deserved as some sort of punitive resentful mentality. After all, those overweight foreigners probably watch porn, elected Trump, and deserve to be punished, right?
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