It is an age-old formula. One man or a group of men get together and plan to con an entire nation on one idea. What is their modus operandi? Find the loopholes in the system, trade in the grey areas, win the trust of the middle-class by showing them the stars and then take them for a spin by busting those stars into dust as they pocket the ill-gained profits. Deceit, misinformation, and manipulation are the common tricks of the trade. This is by and large the story of every scammer who has gone wrong or…right and are rarely held accountable for their “illicit activities”.
In India, scammers are ubiquitous sometimes operating as chit fund middlemen or mortgage lenders in villages to suave bankers and investment advisors in metropolitan cities. Season 2 of Money Mafia documents the frustration and agony of those who fell prey to such scandals. In the series, Discovery Plus delves into the scale and seriousness of the four most shocking scams that have betrayed the trust of India’s middle-class. The four-part series looks into the Ponzi schemes, call center scams, and banking scandals through a range of interviews with the victims, lawyers, writers, and police authorities among other officials.
Produced by Chandra Talkies, the show begins by zooming into the IRS scam, a $300 million fraud case conducted through a fake IRS Call Centre where hundreds of operators posed as US IRS (Internal Revenue Service) officers and called American citizens to extort money.
The second episode looks at the boom-and-bust trajectory of a family-run finance business in Kerala which was giving out gold loans as a non-banking financial company pre-dominantly to Keralites. It explores Popular Finance a Rs 2000 crore fraud by a Non-Banking Financial Company that led to thousands of depositors losing their life savings to an alleged scheme during the pandemic. But according to police, the well-planned idea of the promoters to dupe the investors and flee the country was spoiled by the onset of the Covid-19 crisis.
Meanwhile, the third episode focuses on one of the most popular stock market brokers in India – Ketan Parekh who was mentored by Harshad Mehta and a CA by profession. Quick to pick up the flaws in the system, he majorly traded in the Calcutta Stock Exchange taking advantage of the lack of regulations and was known as the Pied Piper of the stock market as his K-10 stocks, were closely followed by other investors in the market
The fourth episode focuses on the very popular new digital investment cryptocurrency and the frauds around it told by victims who have lost their life savings. India ranks second highest in crypto adoption rate across the globe, as per one report, putting it far ahead of the US, the UK, and China.
Through first-hand accounts of victims, opinions from industry experts, archival footage, and in-depth research, the series will sum up what happened with the masterminds behind these scams with lessons that we should learn from history.
Season 2 of Money Mafia is streaming live exclusively on Discovery plus.
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