In the Bollywood film Bluffmaster! (2005), the eponymous character says, ‘Hamare dhande mein na bandook chalti hai, na bomb, na chaku, chalta hai toh sirf ek hi cheez . . . dimaag . . . aur woh hamesha hamare saath rehta hai, loaded.’ (In our business of conning, we don’t need guns, bombs or knives, the only thing we need is our brains and that’s always ready, loaded.)
Had Priya Seth seen the Abhishek Bachchan-Priyanka Chopra-Nana Patekar starrer? Because she was about to bring her A-Game to the world of conning. Soon after moving to Jaipur, Priya lost interest in her studies. She was tempted by the lavish lifestyle her classmates had. She knew money was the only gateway. And so while in her second year at Parishkar College, she started looking for a job. She knew her college degree wouldn’t be enough to help her secure the kind of life she aspired for. ‘The Rs 20,000 that I was sending her every month for her expenses didn’t cut it. She wanted to be a crorepati,’ her father recalled.
Priya would go on to tell the investigating officer Gur Bhoopendra Singh that she had come for her studies but got lost in the glitz and glamour. Priya searched newspapers and online sites that offered jobs to freshers. There were jobs for typists (she wasn’t professionally trained to be one), for data entry (what is that? she asked) and for office secretary (that could be a start, she thought to herself). But it was an advertisement that said, ‘Earn Thousands Easily and Instantly. No Educational Qualifications Required’ that caught her eye. Priya immediately called up on the number provided and in return was promptly called in for an interview.
This was a gang of pimps who ran escort agencies and prostitution rings. She was offered the job of an escort, with the promise of a bonus if she could recruit young college girls. Priya was initially hesitant. She sat on her decision for days. She wanted the good life, but here she was in a moral dilemma. The pimps were fully aware that the girls who applied for this job were mostly from middle-class homes, desperate for money, and they often employed the pull-push technique to break them down. They would tempt them with dreams of a lavish lifestyle and immediately follow it up with snarky comments like ‘I don’t think you are capable of doing it,’ ‘You look scared,’ ‘If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine, we understand.’ This is the same technique that is used to instil peer pressure and the victims end up doing things because they feel the need to prove themselves in front of these doubting Mohans and Neelams.
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Priya always got what she wanted. And it was this ego that made her blind even to herself. She stepped into the boudoir to offer herself to customers, in her ambition-fuelled craving to reach beyond the stars. She knew this one decision would set in motion larger wheels. She was concentrating on the ‘big picture’. The easy and quick influx of money brought with it a life Priya always dreamt of having. She no longer needed to be dependent on her father financially; she was her own boss. As the extravagant life began to claim her like the ocean claims a shipwreck—bit by bit, corroding it, covering it with weeds—she began copying the affluent girls of her college and their lifestyles.
She began to drink and smoke. One of the newspaper reports quoted the police as saying that Priya ‘came in contact with an agent through an advertisement for a part-time job. The agent asked her to rent an apartment that would be used for prostitution and assured her of good money in exchange’.The police officer, on the condition of anonymity, according to the news report, was quoted as saying, ‘She would befriend wealthy people through dating platforms and escort service websites and invite them to her flat. When the men arrived, she would threaten to register a rape case against them if they did not give her money.’Although Priya denied the above, it is not hard to disbelieve her, considering the refined modus operandi she later used via Tinder.
As the lifestyle and easy money consumed her life, studies took a back seat. She dropped out of college in the second year. Her parents too stopped sending her money as she dropped out of college. Her father was not as angry as he was disappointed. He couldn’t believe that his intelligent daughter would drop out of college and waste her life. Soon, Priya Seth aka Neha Seth became a ‘contrepreneur’ and launched her business.
On numerous escort-offering websites she promised high-profile, young escorts. Having had ‘experience’ for two years in this ‘sector’, she refined her modus operandi. She targeted middle-aged men.
- She wanted successful men who were desperate for an ‘adventure’. She wanted to exploit this ‘need’ because that blinded these men, making them gullible.
- She wanted to target middle-aged men who had careers or were successful. This ensured they would be able to pay up.
- She knew that most of these middle-aged men would be married and therefore would keep their ‘encounter’ as confidential, even if they got conned.
- And the above three immediately sifted out the middle-class variety and the young college boys. As they would find themselves out of the league and in deep waters when it came to the price tag.
According to SHO Singh, dozens of websites offering escort services are created every day, and the police take down close to twenty of them every day. It is a Herculean task to keep track of all these websites and then to follow the mobile numbers advertised on them. And Priya used this cleverly. Priya left her number on various websites that offered ‘escort services in Jaipur’. She limited her services and her clientele to within the city limits of The Pink City. Soon clients started contacting her.
When they messaged her on WhatsApp, she sent them photos to choose from. These were of young, attractive college girls. Once the client chose the girl, Priya would request for the entire payment to be made upfront at the rendezvous point, which was usually a hotel booked by the client. The charges would vary according to the kind of girl they chose and the duration the client booked the services for—ranging from an hour to even a day. Priya would turn up at the luxury hotel, meet the client at the hotel lounge and collect the cash. She had identified a few hotels near Jawahar Circle which she used to suggest to her clients for their rendezvous. Sometimes she would also meet them at public places such as markets and parks or on the streets.
Once the money was collected, she would tell the client to go to their hotel room and wait. And then on the pretext of sending the girl, who was supposedly waiting in the parked car or promising to return after securing the cash, she would disappear with the money, switch off her phone and change her mobile number. The client’s libidinous plans would end up in a cold shower. ‘In these cases, many victims don’t turn up due to fear of public humiliation,’ says Bhopal Singh, the SHO of Vaishali Nagar Police Station.
Priya would charge Rs 25,000–30,000 on an average and try to con at least four customers in a day. And predictably, no one approached the police for help, or lodged a complaint for fear of exposing their own libidinous liaison. Priya Seth soon became a catfishing queen!
This excerpt from Anirban Bhattacharyya’s ‘Swipe Right to Kill’ has been published with permission from Penguin India.