Hi, this is Alex, calling you from the refund department of computer company.

Just to refund back your money, how are you doing today?

I've gotten a lot of scam calls like this over the years.

Sometimes these callers claim to be calling from the IRS, sometimes from the Social Security Administration, sometimes from my tech support company.

And then we are going to refund your money and everyone will be down, down, down.

When I hear their accents, I can tell almost immediately where they're calling from.

The calls usually end when I start using some colorful language in Hindi.

My name is Yudhjit Patacharji and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.

I wrote a story about the flood of scam calls that Americans receive every day and who's behind them.

I've always been fascinated by deception and fraud and scams.

And I'm a very visual person so I found myself kind of picturing these callers sitting in cubicles with headsets on, working in the middle of the night, making hundreds of phone calls to American targets, many of whom are lonely, elderly, and are just sitting ducks for their scams.

To the callers, these people are simply ATM machines that they can squeeze money from.

It's the ultimate commodification of human beings.

Now this camera was talking to a grandma in Tennessee trying to cajole her into logging into her bank account online.

And I was able to hear the state thanks to a computer engineer goes by the name Jim Browning.

And he found a way to hack into the scammer's computers.

And then he's able to eavesdrop on their calls, he's able to record all of the activities on their screens, and he started sharing these with me.

Your computer will be locked and you won't be able to get into your computer anymore for the whole lifetime.

From Jim Browning's work, I learned that a lot of these scam calls were emanating from Kolkata, which is a city that I know very well.

I was born there and I worked there in the mid-1990s as a crime reporter.

So I booked a flight to Kolkata with a plan to try to track down one of these scammers and talk to them face to face.

So here's my story, who's making all those scam calls read by the cost atom.

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