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On a hot and humid August morning last year, Biren Yadav was alone at his home in Gurugram, a New Delhi suburb, when his phone rang. The call was from a woman claiming to represent the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The caller seemed to know everything about Yadav, a 77-year-old former Indian Air Force officer. She read out his address, national ID and tax account number — all correctly. “One of your phones is transmitting antinational messages,” said the caller. “Unless the cyberpolice clears your name, we have to freeze all your numbers.”

That was the beginning of Yadav’s “digital arrest,” an elaborate scam that preys on India’s affluent. This is no small-time hustle. One ex-banker says he was conned out of $2.6 million in August, and government data puts the collective toll at $290 million since 2022. But if global trends are anything to go by, that figure, which tracks 242,000 known cases, likely dramatically underestimates the problem. A survey last year by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a nonprofit based in The Hague, found that only 28% of financial-scam victims report the crime to law enforcement, while 1 in 5 don’t even try to get their money back.

No wonder: Those who try seldom succeed.

The damage caused by the rise of the digital-arrest con — which has found fertile ground amid the country’s soaring youth unemployment, endemic corruption and glaring wealth inequality — runs deep and wide.

Read the whole thing.

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OpenAI’s Pivot to Porn Is Problematic — But Lucrative — Parmy Olson

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A $5.4 Billion Robotics Sale Signals Europe’s Loss of Control — Chris Bryant

This Market Is Nothing Like the Dot-Com Bubble — Nir Kaissar

The Curious Market Timing of Trump’s Tariff Threats — Shuli Ren

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