THE STRANGER ON THE VIDEO CALL: TRUTH-DEFAULT, TRANSPARENCY AND INDIA’S DIGITAL ARREST SCAMS
On 28 August 2024, the eighty-two-year-old chairman of one of India’s largest textile groups answered a telephone call that kept him under fake police custody, on camera, for two days and cost him seven crore rupees. This article reads India’s digital arrest epidemic through two connected bodies of work: Timothy Levine’s truth-default theory and Malcolm Gladwell’s popularisation of it in Talking to Strangers (2019). It argues that these frauds succeed not because their victims are foolish but because the scam weaponises three ordinary features of human communication: our default to belief, our faith in appearances, and the coupling of behaviour to engineered circumstance. It ends with what the psychology of deception cannot explain, which is the entirely rational unease Indian citizens feel when the state appears to come calling.