India, Sept. 6 -- Penalties, in this arithmetic, are not deterrence. They are a licence fee.

Sit long enough in any cyber police station in this country and you begin to hear the same three sentences, in different languages, in different registers of shame: I saw it on Facebook, it looked official, I thought it was real. The complainant is often a pensioner, sometimes a young graduate, occasionally a man who runs a small trading business and considers himself far too clever to be taken. The advertisement that snared him is gone by the time we look for it, dissolved back into the feed that made it, and what remains is a mule account, a UPI trail thinning into nothing, and a first information report that will travel further than the money ...