Another day, another jolt

If there was any doubt about Nehru Place being the IT scam capital of India,
the recent disappearance of Gravis Computers should put it all to rest. The ease
with which scamsters are able to get away duping resellers is remarkable.
Despite the fact that cases like this have become a regular feature, nothing
much seems to be happening on the ground level to minimize them.

Let's first look at some of the cases, which have happened in the recent
past. Take the case of Gravis itself, which probably would be the biggest in
terms of money involved. Earlier reports said that Gravis has disappeared with
Rs 2 crore booty, but now the revised estimates point to a figure of Rs 4 crore.
More than the money involved, the interesting part of this episode is that this
guy was operating out of Nehru Place for close to 10 years and was doing
business with almost all the major players of the market.

Almost a similar case happened around two years back when a reseller called
Kalinga disappeared from the market one fine day with a pretty large amount.
Like Gravis, he had also been operating in the market for more than 10 years and
had the confidence of other channel partners. Till today, there is no news of
that guy and nobody knows where he is.

However, these are pretty straight-forwarded cases where a reseller operating
in the market for quite some time had one fine day decided to close shop and
make himself scarce. Mostly, it is the same set of channel partners who get
duped repeatedly. One of the oldest and prominent channel partner of Nehru Place
has seen it happening to him repeatedly, but still does not take precautions.

Once it was defrauded by a guy who bought goods worth Rs 1.4 lakh by giving
him a bank draft of Rs 1.5 lakh, which turned out to be fake later. Another
time, one of the most trusted employee of the same channel partner ran away with
a huge amount of cash.

One thing that the channel community of Nehru Place does not realize is that
you need to understand and learn from your mistakes. Something they never seem
to be doing. If you look at the list of partners affected by the Gravis episode,
an overwhelming majority of these names figure every time a scam happens in the
capital.

At the same time, there is one silver lining to the Gravis episode. PCAIT,
the newly formed channel association of Delhi has taken up this case on a war
footing, unlike the previous times when the previous association used to remain
a mute spectator. Maybe this is the one trigger, which the Nehru Place channel
community needed to get its act together.

Asim Raina