Nawada: For weeks, Mukesh Kumar waited for the woman he was going to impregnate and the promised payment of Rs 15 lakh. Instead, the 27-year-old labourer from Vaishali in Bihar was a victim of an elaborate cyber scam—the ‘All India Pregnant Job Service’. The perpetrators are from villages in Nawada district, which is emerging as India’s newest Jamtara.
“My wife was three months away from delivering our first baby and I just thought I could utilise this time and the money,” said Kumar. Instead, he lost all his savings. The irony that his phone’s caller tune is an alert against scam calls is not lost on him.
Mukesh is among the hundreds of young men in Bihar and other parts of India who clicked on an ad doing the rounds on Facebook: A woman’s face with the words ‘Call me’. The hook? Get Rs 15 lakh to impregnate an Indian woman. And if you don’t succeed, you’ll still get paid a couple of lakhs.
The perpetrators—unemployed but tech-savvy youth, some as young as 16—are not operating out of high-tech air-conditioned offices with call centre-like setups. They’re using cheap Chinese phones. Their offices are sheds, fields, and orchards in Chakwai, Simri, and Samai villages in Nawada. And they’ve been leading the police on a merry chase.
You may arrest a hundred people for such bizarre cases and still find the 101st person using the scam’s name to extort money.
– DSP Priya Jyoti
DSP Priya Jyoti, who heads the cyber police station in Nawada, likens the scam to a multi-headed Hydra. Her team arrested eight people in 2024 and three more since the start of 2025 when the pregnancy scam made local, national, and international headlines. But that’s just a drop in the ocean.
“You may arrest a hundred people for such bizarre cases and still find the 101st person using the scam’s name to extort money,” she said.
Nawada district has long been a hotbed of scams, swindles, and schemes.
In the early 2000s, newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines were flooded with ads announcing cancer-curing panaceas and energy boosting capsules that were actually filled with flour. When televisions became ubiquitous in rural Bihar, they started promoting ‘Pahchan Kaun (Identify and Win)’ cons by placing blurred or partial images of celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan or Aamir Khan, promising bumper prizes of lakhs to anyone who could identify them. They would get calls from all over the country and extract information like bank details and card numbers from the callers. All this ran alongside run-of-the-mill rackets like fraudulent post office money orders, land scams, honey traps, and the sale of exam question papers.
But platforms like Telegram, Facebook, and WhatsApp have changed the nature of the con. Nawada’s scamsters have now transitioned to digital scams—not with pistols in their hands, but smartphones. The district is competing with other cyber crime hubs like Jharkhand’s Jamtara, Mewat in Haryana, and Bharatpur in Rajasthan.
“There was a time when Jamtara was a stand-alone case for India. But slowly, many pockets like Nawada learnt the tricks of trade, and are emerging as hotbeds of cyber crime,” said IPS officer Sushil Kumar who served the cyber crime branch of Bihar for over five years.
“You name it, and they’ve done it. It’s ever evolving,” said Kumar, who is now posted as SP Training at the Bihar Police Academy in Rajgir. “Some of the educated youth had even gone to Jamtara and returned to their villages to copy-paste the model.”
Nawada has witnessed a surge in cyber crime over the years—from 18 FIRs filed in 2019-20 to 81 in 2024-25, according to data from the district administration. But this, senior police officials said, is not representative of the insidious and pervasive grip scams like the ‘All India Pregnant Job Service’ have on victims.
“Crime has become a status symbol in this region,” said DSP Jyoti.
The perpetrators
On 5 January, around 1:30 pm, six policemen from DSP Jyoti’s team on three bikes swept through Kahuara village. The Nawada Cyber Police had intel on a group of people who were running an ‘All India Pregnant Job (Baby Birth Service)’ and ‘Playboy Service’ scam from this village of around 8,000 people.
“This is an extraordinarily ordinary scam. Who would have thought that making a pregnant woman could get you a million rupees? No young man would refuse it”.
– Sub-Inspector Nilesh Kumar Singh
As the team, dressed in plainclothes, started making inquiries, four young men ran into the mustard fields. The cops followed on foot. The men split in different directions. Finally, after a chase worthy of a scene from Kohrra, three people were arrested. One was as young as 17 years old, said Sub-Inspector Nilesh Kumar Singh who was in charge of the raid. They retrieved six cheap smartphones from Chinese companies such as Vivo and Redmi, job cards, and photographs of women.
Hours before the raid, Singh had logged into the Pratibimb app. Launched by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in April 2024, it uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to assist police officers across India in tracking down networks of cyber criminals by providing real-time locations. That’s when Singh got an alert on the live location of the gang, barely 13 kilometres away from their location in Kahuara village. That’s how the raid was successful.
“This is an extraordinarily ordinary scam,” said Singh. “Who would have thought that making a pregnant woman could get you a million rupees? No young man would refuse it.”
The victims are often poor farmers, labourers, and daily wage migrants. And while the scammers may be siphoning a few thousand rupees instead of lakhs, the sheer volume of the scam makes it profitable. Most victims don’t come forward to register complaints out of embarrassment and fear that their wives will find out.
Though the model has been replicated, the ‘All India Pregnant Job Service’ was born out of a tiny hut near a canal in Nawada’s Gurmah village. The ‘mastermind’ behind it, at least according to the police, was one Munna Kumar—the main accused who was arrested in January last year.
After spending some time working in Rajasthan, Munna returned to Gurmah and announced his plan to set up a fish farm in the ponds near the canal that flowed through the village. He identified potential ‘employees’, and ‘hired’ more than 25 young men. But instead of fishing, he taught them how to phish.
“We never suspected they were scamming people,” said the village sarpanch, Naresh Saw.
Munna had fake SIM cards and cheap cell phones to train the young men. They established watchtowers near the canals to catch networks and make calls. This went on for days, and months, until January 2024, when the police raided this tiny headquarters. The eight arrested secured bail, and the remaining 18 have not been apprehended.
“The first time we heard about such a scam, we laughed until our stomachs hurt. It was so creative,” said Sub-Inspector Singh. But soon, everyone was duplicating the crime, running the police ragged.
The Nawada Cyber Police Station is barely three small rooms within the premises of the SC-ST and women’s police station in the main town. It’s equipped with three desktops and whirring CPUs.
“This police station is highly understaffed,” DSP Priya Jyoti said as she dictated corrections for grammatical mistakes in a court document to a lower-ranking police official.
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Police challenges
With the rise in cyber crime, Bihar established 44 cyber police stations in June 2023. And while there are 660 approved positions, most stations are understaffed.
“The cyber police station in Hyderabad had many—four inspectors, six sub-inspectors, and sixteen constables. And what do I have? One sub-inspector and half a dozen constables,” said DSP Jyoti. She got a chance to visit a Hyderabad Cyber Police Station to arrest an accused in a digital crime case.
There’s no stopping the tsunami of digital scams. In 2024, the state recorded 6.3 lakh fraud calls, with 1.2 lakh victims reporting it through the Chakshu app. Today, people can go to any police station to report a cyber crime. This directive ensures that individuals do not waste the crucial initial days locating the cyber police station in their districts, said an official.
In conventional crimes such as murders, police have the upper hand. But in cyber crime, both the state and the criminals have access to the same technology, internet and knowledge. It’s a level-playing field for both.
– IPS officer Sushil Kumar
Cyber crime in Bihar jumped from 374 registered cases in 2018 to 5,274 in 2024, according to data from Bihar’s cyber crime cell. This is in keeping with trends in other states as well. In Uttar Pradesh, cases increased from 6,280 in 2018 to 10,117 in 2022. And across India, the numbers surged from 27,248 to 65,893 in the same time period. In an attempt to counter the rise in cyber crime, the Bihar government has also launched call centres for victims to call in for help, the Chakshu, as well as training camps for police personnel on digital hygiene.
“In conventional crimes such as murders, police have the upper hand. But in cyber crime, both the state and the criminals have access to the same technology, internet and knowledge,” said IPS Sushil Kumar. “It’s a level-playing field for both.”
It doesn’t help that Bihar’s cyber cells are understaffed.
IG Rakesh Rathi, a 2002–batch IPS officer who currently handles the cyber crime unit in EOU, Bihar, acknowledged the challenges faced by police officers.
“Our officers are trained as generalists, managing a wide range of crimes and public order issues, while scammers and cyber criminals have specialised expertise,” he said.
However, Rathi noted a significant shift in police’s strategy.
“Willing officers with domain knowledge, are being selected, extensively trained, and groomed to handle these complex investigations.”
This year’s Bihar Police Week, being held from 22 to 27 February, is focused on addressing cyber crimes and enhancing cyber security.
The disposal rate of these crimes remains very low, and the conviction rate is even lower. In 2023, out of 68 FIRs registered, only three cases were disposed of by the police, according to Nawada Cyber Police.
This pattern is all too common in all cyber hotspots: raids are conducted, arrests are made, chargesheets are filed, bails are secured. But when it comes to conviction, multiple loopholes remain.
“Currently, cyber crimes are dealt with under the IT Act, which are quite similar to the Consumer Act. Bail is easily available, and minors are put in juvenile homes only to be released later,” admitted Sushil Kumar. He acknowledged that the major cases don’t result in convictions.
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The victims
The same day Mukesh was scammed, the fraudsters made multiple calls to a Patna-based tailor, Birender Thakur. He lost Rs 4,470 to them in the pregnancy scam.
“I am an angutha chhap (illiterate). When I came across a Facebook post with a photo of a young woman and a number saying ‘call me’, I called,” Thakur told ThePrint. First, he was asked to pay a registration fee of Rs 500. Then he was instructed to pay another Rs 5,500 as a security deposit. When Thakur said he didn’t have so much money, the scammers assured him that any amount he could pay would be accepted.
Thakur emptied the rest of his savings, convinced that he’d make up for it when he was paid. He waited for an ‘identity card’ and hotel details, but he never heard from them again.
Ever since the Nawada police informed him that it was a scam and that he wasn’t going to a three-star Patna hotel to impregnate a woman, Thakur has stopped answering unknown calls.
“I curse them. They have scammed a poor person like me,” he said, adding that he hasn’t told anyone in his family and wishes to keep it a secret to avoid turbulence in his happy married life.
“What will people think of me, that I wanted to impregnate a random woman and earn 10 lakh rupees?” he said. Thakur, too, mentioned that the photos of the women were not “high-profile”. They were “ordinary women”, which gave the whole scam a measure of authenticity.
In Mukesh’s case, the fraudsters pretended to be policemen during the fourth call. They claimed he had to pay a fee of Rs 25,000 to avoid charges of involvement in illegal sex work. That was when Mukesh approached the local police and realised he had been scammed. He lost his savings of Rs 6,400, and returned to Hyderabad where he works as a mason, earning a daily wage of around Rs 350-400.
What’s frustrating the police is that the Facebook page of ‘All India Pregnant Job Service’ is still running as a private group with over 2,000 members.
“We have written to Meta, but we still don’t know why it is still up. It has now infiltrated Telegram groups and WhatsApp,” said DSP Jyoti.
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Easy money
Back at Kahuara village, everyone is tight-lipped about the raid that led to the arrest of the two men and the minor.
“My son has done no wrong. I had sent him to feed the cows,” said Ghauli Devi, the mother of the 17-and-a-half-year-old teenager who was part of the gang. Her husband is a daily wage labourer in Mumbai, and she has nobody to turn to.
However, young men like Ghauli Devi’s son are just foot soldiers in this multilayered industry. The money is collected through digital transactions. The groups then place online orders and sell the products in the offline market to get cash. Another method involves using empty bank accounts opened in the names of migrant labourers from across the country to withdraw money.
According to a ‘reformed’ conman, the big players earn crores of rupees and use it to move into legitimate businesses such as poultry farming, brick kilns, or real estate.
“The new crop of young men barely earns 1,000 rupees a day. But they are the ones who get arrested,” he said.
A village of 8,600 voters, Kahuara spans around 12 wards and houses seven government schools. The village head, Dinesh Kumar Singh, has been doing the rounds of all the schools, teachers, and elders trying to understand how the youth got roped into the scam. He’s also fielding inquiries from other village heads.
“How could anyone possibly know what young men are doing with their mobile phones, their heads down? It’s an everyday device,” said Dinesh Kumar Singh. In an effort to bring some positive attention and save face, he opened a village library.
“We want the young ones to take up respectable jobs and return to books if they find themselves too idle, instead of committing cyber scams on their mobiles,” he added.
But his good intentions are at odds with his political ambition. He cannot confront the families of the accused or people he suspects of running cyber scams—not without angering half the village.
“It’s now polarising the village vote.”
Many villages in the cyber crime hotspots such as Katrisarai and Warisaliganj have voted out their leaders for their inability to shield them.
Bhinu Ram, who had served as the village secretary in Kahuara for six long years before transitioning to the district headquarters as an agricultural inspector in 2023, has seen how cyber crime has changed the village’s social fabric.
“Village heads are taken aback by police knocking at their panchayats is a bit of exaggeration. They all know what is going on,” he said. “If you steal crops, cattle, or cash, you’re identified as a thief in the village, and you may be socially boycotted. But if you’re working on a mobile phone in the fields or bageechas, no one pays attention.”
Cyber robbery is now a socially accepted career, he added.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
Why blame the men only? Even Bihari women love to get pregnant every now and then. That’s the reason Bihar tops the chart in TFR.
Bihari men are obsessed with getting women pregnant. No wonder Bihar has the highest TFR in India.
Getting women pregnant is a sure shot way of reducing yourself to penury. Child support is a huge drain on one’s wealth.
Really well-researched article!!