Builder.AI: Yet Another Global Indian Scam?

A London-based startup builder.ai, founded by an Indian named Sachin Dev Duggal,  recently filed for bankruptcy after its ‘neural network’ was discovered to be 700 Indians coding in India. The company promoted its "code-building AI" to be as easy as "ordering pizza".  It was backed by nearly half a billion dollar investment by top tech investors including Microsoft. The company was valued at $1.5 billion. This is the latest among a series of global scams originating in India. 

In recent years, India has emerged as a major hub for global scams. The US government has alleged in court documents that a large enterprise originating from India was involved in stealing nearly $1.5 billion from elderly Americans. Recently, two Indian nationals, Pranay Mamindi and Kishan Patel, were found guilty of participating in a money laundering conspiracy, concealing the source of the money, and using the illegally gained money to further promote a criminal enterprise.  Six other defendants from India also pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. 

These global scams appear to have started amid widespread unemployment in India. Many of the scammers previously worked in call centers where they learned to use computers and telecommunications networks to reach out and talk to Americans. In 2022, U.S. citizens fell victim to a massive loss of over $10 billion from phishing calls orchestrated by illegal Indian call centers, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

Indian-Americans, too, have been found guilty in a number of high-profile scams. A federal jury convicted former Theranos executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, an Indian-American entrepreneur, on all 12 counts of fraud in 2022. Balwani was born in 1965 in Pakistan to a Sindhi Hindu family. His one-time girlfriend and partner Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, was convicted on similar charges earlier that year. Both face up to 20 years in prison. 

Last year, a federal judge sentenced former Outcome Health CEO Rishi Shah, an Indian-American, to 7½ years in prison for a massive fraud scheme that prosecutors say enabled a “jet-set lifestyle” featuring private aircraft, yachts and a tony Chicago home.

In 2020, Dr. John Nath Kapoor, Indian-American CEO of Insys Therapeutics, was found guilty of conspiring to recklessly and illegally boost profits from the opioid painkiller Subsys, a fentanyl spray designed to be absorbed under the tongue, according to multiple media reports.

Rajat Gupta, an Indian-American former global head of McKinsey & Company, was convicted of insider trading in 2012. He was charged with passing on confidential business information about Goldman Sachs to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. Gupta was found guilty on multiple counts of conspiracy and securities fraud and served a two-year prison sentence. 

India Ranks Number One For Misinformation and Disinformation

Beyond the hub of scams and frauds, it seems that India has earned a reputation as the epicenter of misinformation and disinformation. According to experts surveyed for the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risk Report, India was ranked highest for the risk of misinformation and disinformation.  This was on full display during the recent conflict with Pakistan. 

After the recent Pahalgam militant attack in Kashmir, the Indian government immediately blamed it on Pakistan without any investigation or evidence. More than a month later, the perpetrators have neither been clearly identified nor apprehended. And yet, the government of Prime Minister Modi proceeded with air strikes inside Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated and shot down several Indian fighter jets, including its most advanced French Rafales. The conflict began to quickly escalate with strikes and counter-strikes, with the world fearing a nuclear exchange. This prompted the United States and several other countries to intervene and force a ceasefire in less than 4 days of armed conflict. 

During this short 4-day period, the Indian mainstream media was filled with lies. Here's how the Washington Post reported this: "Times Now Navbharat reported that Indian forces had entered Pakistan; TV9 Bharatvarsh told viewers that Pakistan’s prime minister had surrendered; Bharat Samachar said he was hiding in a bunker. All of them, along with some of the country’s largest channels — including Zee News, ABP News and NDTV — repeatedly proclaimed that major Pakistani cities had been destroyed". 

It is unfortunate but true: Fraud and falsehood have become endemic in the Indian society.  Part of the blame falls squarely on the ruling BJP party which promotes falsehoods. In 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-hand man and home minister Amit Shah told his party's volunteers commonly known as Modi Bhakts: "We can keep making messages go viral, whether they are real or fake, sweet or sour". "Keep making messages go viral. We have already made a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in Uttar Pradesh; every morning they are sent a message at 8 am", Shah added, according to a report in Dainik Bhaskar, an Indian Hindi-language daily newspaper.

Related Links:


Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Indian-American COVID19 Researchers Face Fraud Charges

Indian-American Operator Charged With Fraud By US Federal Prosecutors

Lying Indian Media Caught Red Handed

India's Firehose of Falsehoods

Padlocked Grave Story Confirms Yet Again India's Status as the Hub of Fake News

H1-B Visa Abuse By Indian-American Body Shops

India: A Rogue State Ruled By Gangsters?

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  • Riaz Haq

    Sushant Singh
    @SushantSin
    "A strange mix of insularity and delusion, propped up by a media at once sycophantic and hallucinatory, has kept us in denial about the steep drop of the world’s perception of India."

    https://x.com/SushantSin/status/1933016375997403478

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    Mind the gulf
    By Saikat Majumdar

    https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/mind-the-gulf-a-crisis-in-in...

    India’s image problem has now moved into a state of crisis. The gulf between how the country is perceived from outside and the picture of India promoted by the current national government has grown to a point of tragedy or comedy, depending on your perspective. Life, Byron said once, is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Feelings might have taken the driver’s seat, particularly with the brutal tragedy of the terrorist attack at Pahalgam, but the sobriety of honest thought is essential to assess the reality of the conflict with Pakistan that followed. This is where comedy returns, not only as a mark of thinking over feeling but, sadly, also of grotesquery of a different order. It takes us back to the longstanding problem of India’s international image and its startling contrast with the dominant domestic editions.

    The question glares on the trip trail of the international public relations team of multiparty parliamentarians to tell the Indian side of the story in the recent standoff with Pakistan. The Georgetown academic, Christine Fair, gets it exactly right in her interview with Scroll when she points out that the very need for such a delegation marks something of a serious communication failure on the international stage. Pakistan, she reminds us, has been far better at communicating with the Western media. That India has failed at this is the irony of India’s size and heft, both economic and political, and its importance as a functioning democracy, if a rapidly declining one. But if size makes us complacent and inward looking, then we have a problem. We may fume at being bracketed with Pakistan. But sadly, this also shows that we have forgotten how to speak to others, particularly to outsiders who do not buy the ideological marketing of nationalist pride that distorts home truths for our citizenry.

    An indifference to the world outside and the global image of the nation is sometimes characteristic of large nations that have enough within their own borders to preoccupy them. No nation has shown this as revealingly in the modern world as the United States of America whose cultural insularity is the stuff of legend. When you’re in the heart of Middle America where nothing but America is visible for thousands of miles all around, it can get hard to see other cultures beyond your land. Arriving in one such state in the last year of the last millennium as a student, I was appalled at the local image of India as the land of poverty, Gandhi, and the Taj Mahal. But even then, the impending computer glitch of Y2K had brought droves of Indian software engineers to the US, and as I moved to the east coast for doctoral study shortly after the turn of the millennium, I encountered a distinct change in the American image of India. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and other hubs of information technology as well as students and professionals from these domains increasingly defined the country; the ‘third world’ image from the Midwest in 1999 already seemed to belong to another age. When in 2007, somewhere between the arrival of Facebook and the iPhone, I took a faculty position at a university in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered a world where being Indian was synonymous with being smart, specifically a tech-geek — possibly a start-up founder or an ambitious Google employee in Palo Alto, where I lived, occasionally spotting Mark Zuckerberg in the local farmers’ market.

  • Riaz Haq

    Mind the gulf
    By Saikat Majumdar

    https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/mind-the-gulf-a-crisis-in-in...

    From California, the world seemed to look further west, to Taiwan and Hong Kong rather than to western Europe that loomed over the east coast and shaped what Amit Chaudhuri has called America’s “heritage modernity”. Miraculously, India seemed to be an extended part of this Rising Asia, not only in the tech culture it imported through immigrant and outsourced labour but also in the same breath as the great Asian Tiger of China. The market crash of 2008, coupled with the inauguration of the Barack Obama presidency, generated the feeling that the centre of gravity of the world was shifting from the White West and Asia offered the richest promise.

    From being bracketed with China in the first and the early second decade of the twenty-first century, India is now back in the bracket with Pakistan and Bangladesh, just the way things used to be in the 20th century. A strange mix of insularity and delusion, propped up by a media at once sycophantic and hallucinatory, has kept us in denial about the steep drop of the world’s perception of India. Living in India and following the flatulent rhetoric of the government and stakeholders beholden to this leadership, one is made to believe in India’s ‘massive’ economy and vishwaguru status and take a few shopping malls, bullet trains and flyovers, the bare-normal steps of inevitable modernisation, as giant leaps into a shiny global future. But as Pratap Bhanu Mehta pointed out in an article in The Indian Express this February, while India’s delusion of relevance continues to be relentlessly driven by our internal machineries of ideology and a pliant media, neither in global trade, soft power, or political heft does India matter a fraction of what a country of this size and population should — and certainly far less than what our leaders in power would have us believe.

    As someone who now lives in Delhi’s National Capital Region but continues to spend time in different parts of the world, including Africa and Europe, I see both the internal projection and the external reality and the absurd gulf between them. In research institutes, think tanks and policy centres abroad, one hears China in almost every conversation, but India rarely comes up. As the East Asian giant wrests global academic leadership away from the US, particularly in science and tech and most sharply in Artificial Intelligence research, India’s research output remains puny in volume and significance on the global scale. Our sheer size and whatever remaining semblance of democracy we offer give us a podium on the world scale that we immediately squander by being inconsequential on all fronts. No wonder we are left to vie with Pakistan to get the world to take our version of the truth seriously.

    Saikat Majumdar is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Budapest

  • Riaz Haq

    The Indian Express
    @IndianExpress
    2 Indian students sentenced to prison in US for multi-million dollar fraud targeting elderly Americans

    https://x.com/IndianExpress/status/1935865601538355692

    ---------------

    https://indianexpress.com/article/world/indian-students-sentenced-t...

    Two Indian nationals who were studying in the United States have been sentenced to prison in separate cases related to fraud, which involved financial scams that targeted elderly Americans and eventually resulted in loss of millions of dollars, PTI reported.

    Kishan Rajeshkumar Patel, 20, who entered the United States on a student visa was sentenced to over five years in prison (63 months) after he pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Patel took part in an online phishing scam that impersonated US government officials and used fear tactics to extract money, jewelery from the senior citizens, the US Department of Justice stated.

    In a statement, the Department of Justice said “The conspiracy used various online phishing methods and impersonated US government officials, while Patel fraudulently received the cash and gold from victims, conveying a portion to co-conspirators and keeping a percentage for his own benefit.”

    According to a PTI report, the fraudulent scheme defrauded at least 25 elderly American citizens to the tune of over $2 million ($2,694,156). Patel was arrested in August 2024 in Granite Shoals, Texas where he was collecting $130,000. Patel has been in federal custody since August 29 last year.