A few decades ago, a young man with the help of his parents dragged a decrepit wooden cupboard to a store room to make space for a new recliner in their drawing room. The rickety cabinet suddenly piqued the curiosity within the young man. He stealthily broke it open to see what was lying inside. All the four shelves were filled with papers with termites gorging on them. In one of the corners of a shelf, he saw a small box full of 1 rupee coins. There were around 1000 of them in the box enveloped in a thick film of dust. He took a coin out of it and put the box back on the shelf. For quite some time, he examined the coin, flipping it again and again. Soon an idea crossed his mind—doing a novel business with the coins.

He showed the coin to one of his pals and asked him if he could provide him the same coins, he would buy each one of it at Rs 100. His friend found two such coins at his home and exchanged them for Rs 200. Finding the offer lucrative, he soon started buying the coins at Rs 50 and sold them to the young man for higher prices, making a good profit. Now, the news spread across the entire town and everyone appeared to be in a rush to find, buy and sell the coins. The morning newspapers were plastered with advertisement announcing buying the similar coins at comparatively higher prices. Till then, the young man himself had bought 100 coins. He went to market and sold all his coins—new and old. He no longer received them from his friend. In a market economy scenario, it became rather difficult to know who were selling whom. The coin rush had unleashed a bedlam in the town before the government declared it a scam.

The history is littered with scammers. There has been enough literature available—both fiction and non-fiction— about scams and con artists. Frank Abagnale Jr’s Catch Me if You Can talks about his impersonations and frauds. The con artist masqueraded as a pilot and deadheaded between many places. Similarly, he impersonated as a doctor, lawyer and a professor, encashing bad checks worth millions.

A few days ago, a Kashmiri boy was booked in Odisha for the similar reasons. The man has allegedly faked his identity as a doctor and a PMO official. He was also accused of marrying multiple times. Before this incident, Jammu and Kashmir police arrested a Gujarat based con artist from Srinagar.

Last week, social media burst forth with the news of a scam involving a company promising people to double their investment barely in 15 days. Media reports suggest that scores of people have invested in the company run by the scammers and duped people of their hard earned savings.

The noise makers spurred a blame game. Memes, interviews of social media influencers and buffoonery dominated the virtual spaces, digressing the attention from the real questions—the greed and short cut methods of making money.

The current scam is symptomatic of the fact that there are people who choose not to work hard or harder to make their lives better by earning in a fair and honest way. They are to trying to find easy ways to become rich, even if it means to put everything on the line. The greed of having more by putting in less or no effort is bound to drown us all.

The police has already set investigation in motion and they could escape the clutches of the law. Abagnale Jr too was caught. But the question is who will arrest the greed of amassing wealth, employing short cut methods.