Big Tech didn’t invent scams. But Soumya Gupta argues it made the scammer’s job a lot easier by building products people trust, then letting fraudsters hide inside the same familiar workflows.

Gupta’s new book, Bharat Bluff: Inside the Cons of India’s Internet Revolution, is centered on a simple, uncomfortable premise: fraudsters are exploiting the trust people place in major platforms such as Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The modern internet day, in other words, is not just full of “easy” tools. It is also full of easy entry points for people trying to trick you.

Why does this keep happening? Because Big Tech platforms have three powerful traits that map cleanly onto fraud. First, they aggregate attention. Google and Facebook are built to surface information and connect people to what they want. Second, they reduce friction. WhatsApp makes messaging feel instant and personal. And third, they carry brand credibility. When your brain has learned that a platform is usually helpful, it becomes more likely you will accept whatever looks like it belongs there.

Gupta’s framing matters because it places the “how” of scams inside the incentives of the platforms themselves, not just inside the moral failings of scammers. Platforms win when adoption grows. More users, more usage, more engagement. That growth is exactly what creates scale for both legitimate content and fraudulent content. If a fraudster can reach millions through the same distribution channels that deliver real services, the cost to attempt fraud can be low and the upside can be huge.

There is also the governance problem. Managing scams is not like moderating a single kind of harmful post. It is an ecosystem issue. A scam might begin with a message on WhatsApp, route to a payment or form elsewhere, then launder itself through multiple accounts and platforms before anyone can stop it. The result is a kind of operational whack-a-mole: enforcement actions reduce one batch of bad actors, but new ones appear in the spaces created by the same networks.

Regulatory background helps explain why this can lag behind technology. Across many countries, regulators focus on platform accountability, consumer protection, and reporting requirements. But fraud is adaptive. If the platform policies or enforcement tooling are tuned for yesterday’s scam patterns, scammers will shift tactics. And because fraud often targets everyday behavior, it can be hard to distinguish in real time between legitimate user activity and deceptive activity without creating friction for everyone else.

For decision-makers, Gupta’s core warning is not only that scams exist. It is that Big Tech convenience can act like camouflage. When people move their lives into apps, they also move their vulnerability. The blast radius reaches beyond individual victims. It erodes trust in the platforms, raises customer support costs, increases legal exposure, and forces teams to spend more time on “safety” instead of faster product growth.

For peers in similar roles, the second-order implication is board-level. Risk management cannot treat fraud as a narrow policy issue owned by moderation teams. It has to become a cross-functional system that includes identity controls, authentication signals, payments and link safety, detection engineering, customer education, and rapid takedown workflows. Gupta’s focus on Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp underlines that the trust layer is part of the product, not an external add-on. If scammers can exploit that trust at scale, then the business is carrying safety risk proportional to its reach.

Bharat Bluff is essentially a spotlight on the scammer’s playbook as it interacts with the modern app stack. The strategic stake for executives is straightforward: when platforms win by being the easiest place to connect, share, and find information, they also become the easiest place for deception to blend in. The question is whether governance can evolve as quickly as the distribution does.