Fishy Business

THE COVID-19 pandemic may have rendered tens of millions redundant, but one set of people whose fishy business seems to have seen phenomenal growth in these past six months is telemarketers/ conmen. Not a day passes without someone coming up with a new way to try and coax gullible people with their smooth-tongued spiel into parting with their hard-earned money. Posing as Good Samaritans, they exploit an ingrained sense of greed of potential victims. The latest con apparently is to trap people into buying expensive life insurance policy on the pretext of reviving their long lapsed policies. The modus operandi is simple. The caller has nothing but your good at heart, introducing himself as an executive of a major bank which had issued the policy you completely forgot all about. He has accidently discovered that after purchasing the policy, you did not to pay premium in the subsequent years. Told you don’t really recall such a policy, the caller reels off its number, date of purchase, maturity, etcetera. Yes, he can help. Reviving the policy on which you had shelled out, say, Rs 50,000 as first premium, would entail buying a new policy which will enable you in reviving the old, long-forgotten policy. Motivated by the urge to save your original Rs 50,000, you shed all scepticism. Soon, an agent is at your door, ready to sell a brand new policy. This policy would earn the agent virtually the entire amount you pay as premium by way of commission. As the days pass, you find you are saddled with a new policy but there is no sight of the conman who had promised to help you salvage the old policy. The caller and the agent have done the vanishing act. In any case, there was no old policy to begin with. He had worked on natural human gullibility to recover lost investment. Now you are stuck with an actual policy to keep which active, you are expected to regularly pay premium—unless you want to write it off as a dead loss.

How do I tell this tale of deception in such detail? Well, a friend almost fell for the con until at the last minute he got suspicious and threw out the agent. The ubiquity of mobile phones has multiplied the telemarketing frauds a million times. Speaking for myself, on an average, I get a couple of calls daily trying to interest me in some property in Noida or Gurugram. Indeed, owning a vehicle too has become a source of nuisance, with well-established car distributors/ service garages harassing you about ‘due service-tuning,’ or about renewal of the annual insurance, etcetera. Efforts to block such pesky calls through service providers have proved futile. Maybe, the telecom regulator can take a call to ensure that citizens are not troubled by ceaseless unsolicited telemarketing. Or, there could be a mandatory registration of telemarketers to curb their ever-growing numbers. As things are, housewives barely able to string a sentence straight, and with their tiny tots bawling in the background, rudely intrude into your day offering auto or other cheap loans on behalf of major private banks. Technology should aid citizens, not become a tool of harassment.

THE ROLE DYNASTY plays is not restricted to politics or Bollywood alone. It is a powerful impulse to pass on the baton, as it were, to one’s own next of kin, regardless of the field of human enterprise. I was recently struck by the fact that for as long as I can recall whenever newspapers mention Khan Market—yes, the same of Modi’s Khan Market Gang fame—it is one Sanjiv Mehra who is listed as head of its market association. Mehra has been the head for about two decades. Before him, it was his late father. A little curiosity led me to find out about the head of the traders’ body of Connaught Place where I have gone for morning adda with fellow scribes and a smattering of politicians and lawyers for nearly three decades till the advent of the Metro and chaotic traffic overwhelmed us ageing Cona coffee addicts. Here again, the president of the New Delhi Traders’ Association has hailed from the same Bhargava family for over two decades. Before Atul Bhargava, his father was the president for as long as one can recall. Now, this is in no way meant to disparage the role and popularity of either Mehra or Bhargava. Not at all. It is just to point out that the lack of a competent leader outside a single dynasty is not the exclusive headache of the Congress alone.

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