Snigdha Poonam on the Political Economy of Transnational Scams

Today my guest is Snigdha Poonam who is a journalist and writer. She is the author of the new book Scamlands and also the author of the 2018 award winning book Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World.

We talked about the scam industrial complex in different states like Jharkhand, Assam and Tamil Nadu in India, the interaction between the scam economy and the formal economy, the transnational scams in China and Cambodia and how they are connected to India, the aspirations and traumas of the scam work force and much more.

Recorded November 17th, 2025.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:13) - The Scam-Industrial Complex

(00:03:48) - On Jamtara and the Economics of Joining a Scam

(00:09:12) - The Moral Logic of Scamming

(00:13:31) - How the State Enables the Scam Economy

(00:15:54) - Inside Assam's Paperwork and Insurance Scams

(00:23:04) - The Politics of Legibility in Assam

(00:32:47) - Women in the Scam Economy

(00:38:32) - How Scammers Get Trapped Inside the System

(00:46:18) - From Local Scams to Transnational Cybercrime

(00:52:18) - Scam Slavery in Southeast Asia

(01:02:15) - Reporting on the Shadow Economy

(01:10:49) - Starting the Story

(01:16:54) - From Aspiration to Desperation

(01:21:56) - Closing Reflections

(01:27:08) - Outro