A high-stakes cyber caper set in the heart of modern India

Smarak Swain’s The Scammer’s Trail is an electrifying thriller reminiscent of the genre John Grisham has popularised— the legal thriller—but set in the digital age. Swain knows how to hook a reader early, and he doesn’t let go until the final chapter. It’s an easy read, just like his last fiction The Hawala Agent. The novel opens dramatically: the sprawling Bharat Institute of Medical Sciences (BIMS, seemingly located in the fiction where AIIMS is) is hit by a ransomware attack.

Swain pulls the reader straight into the chaos, evoking the panic that ensues in a hospital stripped of its critical IT infrastructure. The stakes are real: not just medical data and government secrets, but reputations, careers, and livelihoods. Forced into a corner, BIMS capitulates by paying an exorbitant ransom in Bitcoins, but now India’s LEAs are looking for the perpetrators. Enter Dr. N. Gandhi Kumar, a respected but quietly restless paediatrician whose ordinary life unravels when he finds himself as the main suspect in the ransomware case. Swain paints Gandhi Kumar as the quintessential everyday protagonist—honest but humanly flawed. The Enforcement Directorate brands him as the mastermind of a cybercrime syndicate and puts him behind bars. Because of quirks of the money laundering law, he cannot get bail till he proves himself innocent.

Advertisement

And to prove his innocence, he needs to go after a cybercrime syndicate of global proportions. Enter Gamini, Gandhi Kumar’s sister and a cybersecurity specialist. She is no detective, but when fate pits her against a rotten Special Director of the ED, she joins hands with unexpected allies to prove her brother’s innocence. The plot moves briskly through shanty neighbourhoods of Delhi and a cast of supporting characters whose motivations are as tangled as the blockchain trail they follow. This book has familiar flavours of Swain’s storytelling seen in The Hawala Agent: the meticulous buildup of evidence, the ethical grey zones, and the subtle manipulation by hidden players.

Swain’s background in bureaucracy injects an authentic realism into investigative procedures, ensuring the narrative remains convincing without sacrificing pacing or excitement. If Grisham is the master of the legal page-turner, Swain here claims a new territory: the cyberprocedural, marked by digital evidence and crypto money trail.

The plotline resonates with a few sensational cases that have hogged the headlines in recent years. There was a rumoured ransomware attack on AIIMS (as reported in the news), which was never confirmed. A senior official of the Corporate Affairs ministry was arrested by the CBI on graft charges, and his family was allegedly humiliated; later the entire family committed suicide.

Crypto scams in Austria reduced significantly when sleuths of the CBI raided and busted a cybercrime command in Delhi’s Shadi Khampur village (Swain has based his cybercrime compound here). And then there are cases of accused who don’t get bail under the money laundering law, because they have to first prove their innocence through a lengthy trial. This makes the story sound familiar and relatable. In the end, The Scammer’s Trail succeeds as a compulsive read. Swain delivers a compelling plot, memorable characters, and just enough moral ambiguity to keep us ruminating much after the last page.

(The author is an IRS officer. Views are personal.)