From Jamtara to Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, OTT is brimming with tales of deception and financial scandals. Following in the footsteps of Amazon Prime Video’s Farzi, which became the platform’s most-watched Indian show of all time, Sony Liv is now airing Hansal Mehta’s Scam 2003: The Telgi Story. And unlike Farzi, which was a fictional account of a counterfeiter, Scam 2003 draws from the real-life exploits of Abdul Karim Telgi, the kingpin of the stamp paper scam that rocked India in the early 2000s. Before this, Hansal and Jai Mehta’s 2020 show Scam 1992 had viewers hooked on the story of a flamboyant stockbroker who brought Dalal Street to its knees toward the end of the 20th century.
Indians clearly have a thing for scams and scamsters, and the success of such shows reveals our voyeuristic appetite for people who game the system, whether they are underdogs on the verge of a big con or powerful people raking in crores. Greed, corruption, and the amassing of wealth with the occasional murder thrown in make for good TRPs.
Scam 1992 gathered 6.6 million views, ranked 16th among the top 50 global television shows, and earned an IMDB rating of 9.6. Scam 2003 isn’t far behind – in just a week of its release, it has already raked in 5.7 million views to become one of India’s most-watched web series.
On the face of it, the fictional artist Sunny (Shahid Kapur) from Farzi and Sony Liv’s iteration of Telgi (Gagan Dev Riar) are worlds apart, but both men have arrogance and hubris in spades. Sunny is sure no one will catch him – so much so that he leaves behind his signature in all the notes he counterfeits. Telgi, however, is caught multiple times, and each time, he comes out of jail with renewed vigour to orchestrate an even bigger scam.
But there is also another key difference between Sunny and Telgi. Sunny resembles Bollywood’s quintessential angry young man–chiselled abs, beautifully messy hair, and a carefully crafted careless style. Telgi, on the other hand, is a nobody, his potbelly, hawai chappals and common persona making it difficult for anyone to take him seriously. That he scams his way through politicians and police despite this personality makes him more of an ‘artist’ than Sunny.
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Scams dominate Indian screens
The last three years have seen a steady rise in financial fraud-based shows and documentaries on OTT. From Netflix’s Bad Boy Billionaires (2020) and Jamtara (2020) to MX Player’s Shiksha Mandal (2022) and Sony Liv’s The Whistleblower (2021), scams dominate Indian screens. And it’s interesting to see the range of topics covered – rigged entrance exams, corporate felonies, phishing, and more.
In Bad Boy Billionaires, directors Dylan Mohan Gray, Nick Read and Johanna Hamilton devote an episode each to the four most notorious billionaires in recent times: Vijay Mallya, Subrata Roy, Nirav Modi, and Byrraju Ramalinga Raju. The docu-series closely examines how these billionaires built their empires and how their financial crimes led to their tragic fall.
“There is a possibility of doing Bad Boy Billionaires in other parts of the world, and I think that was envisioned, because there are many characters like this in many other parts of the world,” Gray, who directed the first episode on Mallya, told The News Minute in a 2020 interview.
Jamtara, on the other hand, stood out for the audacious cybercrime empire that sprouted and grew in the namesake small district in Jharkhand, where 76 cases of cybercrime were recorded in 2021 alone. In this poverty-stricken corner of India, youngsters who barely made it through middle school scammed professionals across the country. “I feel that Season 1 was a hit because the scams that we showed have happened to someone or the other at some point in their lives,” Sparsh Shrivastava, who plays scamster Sunny in Jamtara, told The Telegraph last year.
In Shiksha Mandal and The Whistleblower, showmakers peeled back layers of the infamous Vyapam Scam of 2013. While both shows fall short in terms of quality, they do give some valuable insights into how the lives of aspirants were gambled away by masterminds of the scandal, which came to light when it was revealed that several exams conducted by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavasayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam) were rigged for money.
These shows have brought fragmented, insipid newspaper reports to life, transforming them into well-ordered, vibrant narratives.
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How books become a starting point
Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992, Scoop (2023) and Scam 2003 are all based on books written by journalists.
“The book is a good starting point and helps because some of the research has already been done by the writer. We then dramatise and fictionalise in the script,” Mehta told ThePrint.
But we do not sensationalise, he stressed. “It is about intent, to create a character for the audience to internalise.”
The shows have been careful while treating their subjects; there is no celebration or glamourisation of the scams or scamsters.
“What I admire is probably how sharp his brain was, and he used to think far ahead, even though it was not for a good cause,” said Riar, who plays Telgi. But he is careful not to play the fraudster like a heroic figure.
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Where the charm lies
The allure behind scam-based shows likely stems from India’s fascination with rags-to-riches stories, jugaad, and, more recently, imitating con artists.
Delhi police busted a fake currency racket in June this year, where the accused allegedly confessed to having been inspired by Farzi to produce fake currency in the denomination of Rs 2,000. A month after the show was released in March, Gurugram-based YouTuber Joravar Singh Kalsi and his friend Gurpreet Singh threw money from their car, imitating a scene from the Raj and DK show. The video went viral on social media.
Moreover, after Netflix exposed cybercrime in Jamtara, Haryana’s Mewat made headlines for using ‘sextortion’ to make money. Recent reports about the Adani Group’s alleged stock manipulation also seem to harken back to the Harshad Mehta era, and the show on him that broke all records three years ago.
It is almost a cycle–life mirrors art, and art mirrors life. And in India, it is clear that scams have become the flavour of the season.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)