The Fifth Floor: India's deadliest scam

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Instant loan apps promise easy money. But what's the catch? Investigative reporter Poonam Agarwal and filmmaker Ronny Sen take us behind the scenes of their award-winning documentary The Trap: Inside the blackmail scam destroying lives across India.

This programme contains discussion of suicide and suicide attempts. If you feel affected by this topic, you could speak to a health professional or an organisation that offers support. Details of help available in many countries can be found at: www.befrienders.org

Produced by Alice Gioia and Caroline Ferguson.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:04.0	This is
0:05.0	You're actually
0:09.0	the fifth floor.
0:10.0	The fifth floor de noos the fifth floor in the news.
0:14.0	We see me.
0:15.0	To me have this fifth floor
0:17.0	fornak and me this obat.
0:21.0	This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all around the world.
0:29.0	I'm your host, Parenak Annie Dee. How many apps have you got on your phone? I was just checking mine and I have 49 different apps on there.
0:45.0	Some of them are really useful and to be honest I don't even remember how I used to go about my daily life without them.
0:52.0	Like payment apps or navigation maps.
0:56.9	But what if the simple act of downloading one of these apps became my worst nightmare.
1:04.0	He showed me those photographs and I blacked out.
1:10.0	I don't know how many nights I've gone without sleep.
1:17.0	The abuse started from day one. Where are you?
1:21.0	Share your location. We will come to your house. My relatives started getting calls. I started trying.
1:28.8	A lot of people say they'll take their own life when they cannot pay.
1:36.0	It's a trap. It's a big trap.
1:41.0	The thing that is creating so much distress in these people's lives is an instant loan app.
1:48.0	They took money out of it and found themselves trapped in a nightmare of blackmail extortion and abuse.
1:57.2	These stories are featured in an award-winning BBC documentary called The Trap, Inside the Black Mail scam,
	...

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