There were two news today.. One about Arnab’s WhatsApp and another about Nidhi Razdan…. Since we are talking about Journalists we will just talk about Nidhi…

How does someone so high in position with so much knowledge get scammed like this… ? That is a question that worries people.. And here is my personal take..

We all are gullible in one way or other because we all have our aspirations and we all are in search of something. 

Let us leave scams for a moment and talk about opportunities. I think People who are clear on what they want in life can find the right opportunities better than others who wander through aimlessly…

This also means we will start constructing a version of the good world ahead in our mind. if someone follows us regularly and understands what we have been searching for and connect the dots and they can get into our world version and play us… Not generalizing but a possibility…

What is the solution? I think it is precaution more than solution. But how…

For example, If many of us get an offer such as that from Harvard we will know immediately that it is a scam because there is no way that it can be us. But for someone like Nidhi it might not be that quick as she might be really eligible for something like that with her experience and even aspires for it.

Scammers come based on your worth and they have progressed beyond the old email scams that was one size fits all….

We all are in search of something and so we will be in the radar of scammers… we cannot stop searching either. We will know the details only when we know how it started and I am hoping Nidhi will throw more light on it down the line.

Now for precaution… I think we should get into the habit of pull information rather than be recipients of push information… you can then decide where to pull from and how…  you are more in control (never fully in control 🙂 ) than being at the mercy of marketing algorithms or scammers

That said imagine a scenario where you have applied for a job somewhere and someone know that you have and they take it over from there on and start communicating with you while your real application is somewhere in a deck of other applications. Would we question? Not necessarily…

Again it depends how convincing they are… What is our basic tendency to trust or mistrust ?

Here are a few questions in my mind when anything like this happens. And I write this knowing very well that I might forget them when my own version of good world ahead is compromised 🙂

1. Is this for real? (we ask that often but often in an elated way rather than questioning the validity)
2. How can I re-confirm this outside the current network? (There can always be a way)
3. What is that final point beyond which it cannot be fake. (I am thinking in this case a visit to Harvard would have been part of the process if it was not the pandemic.. I don’t know)
4. What if this whole thing is a scam. What do I stand to lose? (The possibility of scam is real in anything and let us all understand that)
5. When do I make changes to my current world to make way for my version of the good world ahead. (I am not sure if Nidhi leaving her previous role is a result of this)

I hope we all get to know more on this again. But the fact is ‘How come Nidhi’ is not relevant as we all are gullible. No immunity there… This also brings us to a very scary point. How do we even trust anything that comes around to us? from any source for that matter. There can be phishing in some point along the information chain.

Categories: Articles & Opinions, Opinions

Tags: Arnab Goswami, NDTV, Nidhi Razdan, Phishin, phishing, scammers