The irony is thick enough to choke on. An immigration officer—a man professionally trained to spot a fake passport from thirty paces and sniff out a lie before it’s even fully formed—just handed over ₹79 lakh to a group of digital ghosts. That’s about $95,000. It’s not just "oops" money. It’s "sell the ancestral land and hope the kids don’t want to go to college" money.

The playbook was standard. It’s the same one being run on grandmothers in Florida and tech bros in London. A random message. A polished "investment advisor." A dashboard that looked like Bloomberg but worked like a video game. Our victim, stationed at the front lines of national security, didn't see the red flags. Or maybe he saw them and decided they were just part of the festive decor.

He got hooked through a WhatsApp group. That’s where the modern tragedy begins now. Not in a dark alley, but in an encrypted chat with a profile picture of a woman in a business suit holding a latte. The pitch was simple: high-frequency crypto trading with guaranteed returns. It’s the kind of logic that only makes sense if you’ve completely given up on the laws of physics.

He started small. A few thousand rupees here. A quick win there. The scammers even let him withdraw a little bit of money early on. That’s the "pig butchering" phase. They feed you, make you feel fat and happy, and wait for you to bring the real weight to the table. And he did. He brought seventy-nine lakhs worth of weight.

Then came the friction. When he tried to pull his supposed "millions" out, the UI suddenly grew teeth. There were "taxes" to be paid. There were "liquidity fees." There were "security deposits" to prove he wasn't laundering money. It’s a brilliant bit of psychological torture. To save the money you’ve already lost, you have to throw more good money after it. It’s a sunk-cost fallacy wrapped in a digital nightmare. By the time he realized the "mentor" wasn't answering his messages, the wallet was empty and the website was a 404 error.

We love to talk about the "democratization of finance." It’s a phrase people use when they want to sound like they’re doing something noble while selling you a lottery ticket. The reality is that we’ve built a financial system that is fast, global, and utterly indifferent to human error. Crypto didn't create greed, but it sure gave it a Ferrari.

The officer probably spent his days scrutinizing visas and checking for inconsistencies in stories. He lived in a world of physical barriers, stamps, and bureaucratic gatekeeping. But the internet doesn't care about borders. The people who took his money could be in a high-rise in Manila or a basement in Bucharest. They don't need a visa to ruin your life.

This isn’t a story about a lack of tech literacy. It’s a story about the death of skepticism. When the "investment" app shows a green line going up, the logical part of the brain—the part that knows you don't get 300% returns by clicking a button—simply goes for a walk. We’ve been conditioned to believe that code is magic. We think that if it’s on a screen and looks professional, it must be backed by something more than hot air and malice.

The police are "investigating," which is a polite way of saying they’re filing paperwork that will eventually sit in a dusty cabinet. Tracking crypto is possible, sure, but clawing it back from a decentralized mixer is about as likely as catching smoke with a butterfly net. The money is gone. It’s been converted into someone else’s offshore real estate or a fleet of leased Lamborghinis.

We’re told that the future of money is trustless. That’s the big selling point. You don't have to trust the banks. You don't have to trust the government. But as it turns out, when you remove the institutions, you’re just left with the humans. And humans are, by and large, incredibly good at lying to each other.

It makes you wonder about the next guy in line at the immigration desk, clutching a slightly suspicious work permit and sweating under the fluorescent lights. Is the officer going to look at him and see a security risk, or just another person who might be easier to read than a WhatsApp chat?

If a man trained to guard the gates can’t even guard his own bank account, what hope is there for the rest of us who just want to retire before we're eighty?