Does Indian Society Train Indians to Cheat and Lie?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • India is a society that has created broad-scale cheating and deception.
  • Now that millions of Indians live in the US and other European-based countries, these deceptive tactics impact non-Indians in a significant way.

Introduction

  • Indians began to flow into the US significantly with the change in the H1-B law in 1991.
  • Indians came from a highly corrupt society where Indians consider cheating to be expected, and those who do not cheat are “naive” and lack “survival skills.”
  • In that roughly 30 years, the US went from having a negligible number of Indians to Indians being over 1% of the population and proliferating. In these three decades, Indians have developed a reputation for being the least honest of all racial groups and being prosecuted for white-collar crime entirely out of proportion with their numbers.

This article will review insightful quotes on how India has a culture that creates dishonest people who threaten the people in the countries to which they immigrate.

See our references for this article and related articles at this link.

Understanding The Cheating Culture of India

Indians do not tell the people they meet in the US, Europe, and other places they immigrate because India is a country where cheating is normalized. Indians are very good at seeming personable, but this is part of how they get non-Indians to lower their guard. You can’t cheat someone if their guard is up, so Indians learn to pretend to be non-threatening. Most Westerners confuse this with being friendly. However, it is not friendly it is fake and part of a strategy.

And Indians enjoy talking to Westerners at work, but this is not the type of conversation most Westerners are used to. I call it closer to a type of surveillance, as I cover in the article Should You Talk to Indians.

As soon as Indians obtain the information they want and take advantage of the person they had previously been friendly with, they quickly turn cold. Indians can’t necessarily take advantage of every Westerner they meet, and they gain status from having non-Indian friends. Remember, invading white areas is their primary mechanism of improving their lives. And having white friends demonstrates that they fit into a society they could never have created on their own. Also in India the lighter a person’s skin, the higher their status. Indians find themselves in a strange situation where they look up to people with lighter skin than them but are still compelled to cheat them.

So they may continue to be friendly if they can’t find a way to take something they want. For each Indian, the number one accomplishment in life was to get out of India and to a Western country.

Cheating is Taught to Indians at a Young Age

Cheating is instilled in children by their parents, as is explained in the following quotation.

When an Indian child is growing up, her parents ask her at some point: “Beta, which one is your favorite scam?” The kind of scam you like reveals a personality type—a guide to the future, indispensable to worried parents. My answer as a schoolboy was unwavering: “Mummy, fodder scam.” – Daily O

How Indians View Becoming a Scammer as a Right of Passage

In India, coming to maturity, in part, means learning how to scam. Those who are unwilling to do this are often described as immature, and this is how parents provide their children with necessary survival skills. Another framing Indians use is intelligence. An intelligent person cheats, and a slow person does not. This is partly why Indians view Westerners as not as clever as they are. Smart people cheat in the Indian concept.

To learn to cheat in India is to learn how to survive. If you don’t, society will treat you as an imbecile who never grew up. Like the freelance writer. – Daily O

Indians say this is a response to living in India. However, it brings up how India became this way in the first place, which is a topic for another article.

In Indian, There Only View Two Classifications: the Exploited, and the Exploiter

Another statement made by Indians is that there are only two classifications of people: those who are exploited and those who are exploited. And since there are only two choices, it makes sense to be the exploiter, as explained in the following quotation.

The working principle is this: If you don’t exploit, then you will automatically become exploited. What happens then is that since everyone is cheating everybody else, all this cheating cancels each other out in the final sum.

It’s the reason people don’t change neighborhoods, although familiarity is no guarantee that you will not be cheated. There is a cold-bloodedness to our human relationships: false obsequiousness always follows a successful heist. – Daily O

This is what I was referring to earlier. Indians will often seem very friendly. People will read articles on Indian IT on this website and often say that they have “Indian friends.” These “friends” are in the obsequious phase of the relationship, also referred to as the information-gathering phase.

The quote continues.

This cheating can be about the smallest of things, beginning with plumbers, electricians, carpenters, the cab ride from the airport or train station.

Every tourist is fair game, which is why we have to chaperone, baby sit and play tourist-guide to our foreign guests. They can’t be left alone. They will be fleeced. – Daily O

When Indians come to Western countries, they are faced with high-trust societies. However, that trust has been declining, and as society becomes less dominated by European culture, income inequality is continually increasing. For Indians, these are perfect cultures that lack the natural defenses that they face when trying to cheat other Indians in India.

Scams in India Apply at the Most Basic Level, Even Receiving Change

Dealing with scams in India daily.

You will hand in a five hundred rupee note, the cashier will keep it and return much less than you’d calculated. When you say “Hey, what happened to the rest?”, he’ll reply: “Oh sorry I thought you gave me a hundred.” He’s testing you.

That’s the reason why Indian parents always warn their kids: Don’t let your guard down for a moment. The moment you do, you’ve been had. – Daily O

A Model Where Everyone Scams Everyone Else

The following quote describes 360-degree cheating that is part of Indian culture.

The fancy gift shop guy will put whimsical price stickers on smuggled items, doubling his profits. But remember his mother-in-law will get cancer, which is when the hospital will get the chance to screw him.

Why, for all our family values, family members cheat each other all the time. Especially when it comes to matters of property. The younger brother will keep squatting on prime ancestral property after the patriarch/ matriarch has died and refuse to vacate. – Daily O

Cheating among and within Indian families is widespread. This is true in India when Indian families migrate to Western countries. From the outside looking in, it appears that Indians are only “sticking it” to non-Indian outgroups, but I have observed many situations where the exploitation within families is breathtaking. In one case, several Indian men who were quite wealthy (running scams in the tech industry) would debate which brother would have to look after the mother — which no one wanted in their house. Amazingly, several brothers’ much higher wealth did not factor into how the mother was taken care of. Everything with Indians, even in families, is about power, not ethics, as it is tough to discern anything related to ethics in Indian culture. Observation, interaction, and information gathering are used to identify the exploitable party. There is no Western concept of a thing being wrong or right.

A Society Without Trust

Basically, if you don’t look local enough, you don’t bargain hard and question every transaction, you will be a sitting duck. That’s the default Indian setting. No Indian trusts the next Indian. Trust signals gullibility, not a valued trait in our urban jungle. – Daily O

This gets back to the principle that those who trust are stupid. This was expressed in a court case where a company found that an Indian consulting company had provided false customer references to them in the presentation. Amazingly, the defense presented in court by the Indian consulting company was that while the references were fake, the customer should have verified these fake references. You can read this shocking defense in the article How To Understand Wipro’s Position on Lying.

This position by Wipro is the position of Indian culture. It is their prerogative to lie and the other person’s responsibility to catch them.

This also explains why India and Indian companies are so unproductive. An enormous amount of time by Indians is spent trying to protect themselves from being taken advantage of while they correspondingly try to take advantage of others. When Indians immigrate to a European-based culture, they are in a situation where they do not have to worry about being scammed. And even better, they have a large population willing to be open to Indians and are taught that everyone has the same ethics. It is wrong to discriminate against people, even if they have a long-established history of dishonesty.

Understanding Academics in India

Indians will often talk up their degrees. However, if one has enough money, one can buy degrees. Furthermore, there is an enormous amount of cheating in India. Therefore, obtaining a degree does not mean that the Indian in question did even most of the coursework themselves.

This is explained in the following quotation.

In all my 28 years in this country, I’ve seen lying and cheating as a way of life.

Started all the way back in school when copying from others wasn’t just common, but even something people were proud of.

Then I went to college and plagiarism was rampant. Copying papers from friends, downloading papers online, etc. was the norm.

Even in school science fairs, you had people buying pre-made science projects from shops and passing it off as their own. Every city has these shops, usually near college/school stationery stores that will make science projects for you.

Some of my friends went on to do PhDs. There is a massive cottage industry of “PhD mills”. Basically, some guy will write a PhD thesis for you (for as little as 20,000). Some third rate university will grant you a PhD on the basis of this fraud PhD. The PhD topic will be extremely generic and not worth its paper. – Reddit

Most Westerners are unaware that degrees are just another scam, as with most things in India. When Indians come to western countries, they often add fake certifications, covered in the article How Indians Coordinate to Fake Their IT Certifications.

Bought PhDs in India

Suppose we look at an Indian Ph.D It is essential not to consider a person with a Ph.D. from India as a real Ph.D. Furthermore, a fundamental concept of a Ph.D. is that one uses evidence to determine the conclusion, which is entirely antithetical to Indian culture. In Indian culture, the approach is to decide which outcome is most financially beneficial and then create the information that supports his conclusion. This is why an Indian with a Ph.D. is different from a Westerner with a Ph.D. This is not to say many Western Ph.D.’s fake research — this is now standard in, for example, pharmaceutical studies. I am saying that the scientific method is entirely foreign to Indian culture. This explains why no Indian has won a Nobel Prize in India after independence from England, as you can see on the website Who Won Nobel Prize.

A Culture of Scarcity

India has a culture of scarcity, and it leads to extreme hoarding. You keep the absolute most for yourself and your family and give the least to everyone else.

This is expressed in the following quotation.

Insecurity and fear drives us to over protect interests, make everything doubly sure and worry about the end and not the means. You see people with comfortable salaries stuffing themselves at a buffet to get their money’s worth; but they eat at restaurants daily, they aren’t really struggling. – Reddit

Indians in the US have demonstrated enormous greed and corruption levels, yet they are virtually never called out for it. Long after they have enough, the pattern of corruption continues. And the excuse given is that they had some restrictions in the past.

Number of Indians Prosecuted for White Collar Crime

This behavior has led to trouble with authorities for white-collar crime.

And look at prosecutions by the US government for white collar crime on Wall Street. Even though Indians are only 1% of the US population, a significant amount of the notable prosecutions have been against people of South Asian descent: Raj Rajaratnam, Rajat Gupta, Anil Kumar, Mathew Martoma, etc. On the flip side one of the reason Indian Americans have done better in the US than other groups like Chinese or Koreans and have CEOs at companies like Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, etc is that they are willing to take advantage of people, stand up for themselves, take risks. So it works both ways. – Reddit

The problem with the last part of this quote is that “Indian Americans have done better in the US than other groups,” which is that much of this doing better is taking the benefits of society from non-Indians. So it is unclear how it “works both ways.” But this is written from the perspective of an Indian, and as I have discussed above, engaging in fraud and white-collar crime allows them to succeed; therefore, it cannot be wrong in their minds.

Indians cheat those around them, which allows them to have higher incomes. Any group dedicated to cheating will do better than those that don’t. And there is an extra benefit that Indians have: because they are not white, they benefit from the politically correct culture of not holding non-whites to the same standards of behavior as whites.

How Political Correctness Protects Indians from Being Called Out

I have covered in other articles that whites do not appear to hold non-whites accountable for ethical behavior. You can see several other examples of this. There is slavery in many places globally, but there is a low emphasis on stopping it. I explain this in the article Is It Slavery if the Slave Owner Is Not White?

This is also true of apartied. There are several places where apartheid is practiced, but there is again low emphasis on applying pressure to these countries, and things bring up the question of whether it is still apartheid if it is not whites doing it.

Indians that immigrate to Western countries have died and gone to heaven. Not only are they presented with a population who have no natural defenses against them, but as they are not white, whites are far less likely to hold them accountable for unethical behavior. The level of delusion on this point has been quite shocking. It has been explained to me that even though Indians do reduce standards, and their existence in the US is bad for domestic workers, everyone is the same. It is wrong (and therefore unethical?) to hold Indians accountable in the way I am doing in this article. This means that the ethical problem is not with Indians but those who call out Indians for unethical behavior. Try figuring out that logic.

However, political correctness has never been about being accurate but about setting up a system that censors accurate information but states that non-offensive statements are preferable to accurate statements.

The Connection Between Political Correctness and Totalitarianism

This video describes how political correctness, a form of speech control and, therefore, mind control, eventually devolves into things that can be thought and not be thought. This video compares political correctness to authoritarianism in China.

One might observe that the most politically correct individuals have been asking for censorship in the media. Some proponents of political correctness think some speech is protected, but offensive speech or “hate speech” is not, and this is incorrect under US law. If such a restriction were ever allowed, there would be an immediate move to categorize everything one disagreed with as hate speech so that it could be legally suppressed.

A perfect example of this is the media censorship on topics related to Covid. It is now common for Big Tech to censor what they don’t like, but it started by saying some things should not be said because they hurt other people’s feelings.

This article is highly politically incorrect. It will hurt the feelings of Indians, but in particular, Indians would like this article to be censored as they want to keep scamming non-Indians without anyone warning them about how Indians behave. And if Indians could, they would certainly censor this article.

Something else that non-Indians know is that India has no freedom of speech, routinely has journalists killed, and does not hold freedom of speech as an essential value.

Poverty and a Third World Mind Set?

What many Westerners don’t comprehend when they disregard unethical behavior on the part of Indians is that the Indians that can get over to Western countries are not the most exploited Indians. Still, the Indians from the upper classes are the exploiters. They are part of families that have, for in many cases, hundreds or thousands of years, specialized in exploiting lower caste Indians.

Once they are given access to immigrate to a Western country, they continue what their families have been doing for generations, but not they do this to Westerners.

This is explained in the following quotation.

It’s caste, for thousands of years people have lived off by screwing up people “below them”, they never had any interest in functioning as an efficient system, ethics was never a part of their social code. Moreover, homogeneous society where everyone is almost same are more probable to show ethical behavior example : Japan

However, it’s also a function of GDP. India would be a very different place if Bihar -UP-WB could triple their GDP and invest in education-Health and good governance .

People saying poverty is the reason: hell no South Chhattisgarh is one of the poorest places in India but has the most one of the most honest Adivasis living there. – Reddit

And no Westerner will ever find these Adivasis immigrating to a Western country. Each of the Western immigration programs has had their work and student visa programs rigged to maximize the number of Indians allowed into the country. The corruption and fraud in these programs are covered in the following articles.

Articles on Indian Fraud in Work and Student Visa Programs

How 77% of H1-B Applications Hydrabad in 2011 Were Fraudulent

How India Pressures the US Government to Look the Other Way on H1-B Visa Fraud

How New Jersey Became The Center of Indian H1-B Visa Fraud

After H1-B, The L-1 Visa Program is the Next Worker Immigration Program to be Scammed

Who is Doing Anything About The Out of Control H1-B Visa Program?

Canada’s Fast-Growing Problem with Indian IT

India’s Overpopulation Problem

India has quintupled its population since independence from England in 1947, which means the competition for everything in India is overwhelming. This is explained in the following article.

Resource crunch cos of the population. Limited resources, too many people, everything turns into a rat race. The schooling system is compromised cos how are you gonna keep up the education quality when there is one teacher for as many as 50-60 students? And when overpopulation becomes the norm for generations, this cheating, lying, etc etc will become a part of the culture, as it already has. – Reddit

This gives one an appreciation of the culture unleashed on European-based countries. It has been estimated that at least 1/3 of the Indian population would like to immigrate to a European-based country. That is 1/3 * 1.4 billion or 462 million Indians who must find a home in a European-based country. And that is 462 million Indians who have been culturally conditioned to view cheating as something that mature people must do to survive. And the only thing stopping even more than the hundreds of thousands of Indians that come to the US (as one example) every year (as I cover in the article How the H1-B Program Understates The True Number of Yearly H1-B Visas, is legislation. Corporations have declared their interest in bringing over 1 million Indians per year, as I cover in the article Companies Would Like to Flood the US with One Million H1-B Visa Workers Per Year. 

Seeing Scams in India Up Close to Understand Indian Culture

India is a nation of scams. Besides being a generally dirty or unkempt country, India does not receive that much tourist business, even though it is one of the least expensive countries to visit in the world. 

Let us take stock of the lies told in this video.

Lie# 1: “The Train (You Wanted) Was Cancelled”

The travel agent is lying to the mark about trains being canceled. This allowed the agent to change to another transportation, giving the travel agent more money from the transaction.

Lie# 2: The Markup Was Low

The markup this agent charged was not low and unreasonable on the tickets.

Lie# 3: The Indian Government Receives All of the Money from the Transaction

The agent lies about not taking any money from the transaction, saying it goes to the Indian government.

Lie# 4: The Other Travel Agents Charge Double the Price He Was Charging

The agent lies about any other travel agent charging double the price.

Lie# 5: “The Other Agents Are Scammers”

The agent presents the idea that other travel agents are scammers, and this is true, but he is not honest as a defense if he is also a scammer.

This last lie fits into a pattern of Indians that once a person becomes aware of how Indians function, the Indian switches gears and says that is true of some Indians but not them. I cover this in the article Should You Try to Find Good Indians While Risking Bad Indians?

IT professionals have to deal with this question as Indians have taken over the recruiting market from domestic recruiters. It is challenging for a domestic IT worker to benefit from dealing with an Indian recruiter, as I cover in the article The Terrible Rise of Indian Recruiters. The article Why Dealing with Indian Recruiters is Futile for Domestic Workers.

Throughout the interaction with the travel agent, notice how genuine he looked. Indians begin lying early on, and adults are very good at it.

Religious Scams in India

Religious scams are a big thing in India. Just as in the US or Europe, Indians in tourist areas believe they are justified in telling any lies to Westerners. The mistake is thinking that even the most esteemed high-status Indian in the US, say Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, or an educated Indian who works a few cubes down from you, is any different. 

Saying That The Place You’re Looking for Has Moved Or is Closed

This is a common scam that you are likely to experience all over India, but most often around tourist destinations in major cities. In Delhi, travelers looking for the International Tourist Bureau/Passenger Reservation Center at New Delhi Railway Station are often told that it’s closed or has moved. They are then taken to a travel agent to make their booking. At New Delhi Railway Station you may also be told that your train has been cancelled, and you will need to take a car or a different train to your destination.

Other variations of this scam will be encountered when you attempt to visit shops and tourist attractions that are apparently “closed”. In each case, an offer will be forthcoming to take you to an alternative and sometimes even “better” place. – Tripsavvy

Traveling in India means dealing with nonstop false information.

Offering a Reduced Taxi Fare in Return for Visiting Emporiums

While this isn’t a scam as such, it can still be quite a bother. Taxi drivers will often offer a reduced fare if visitors agree to stop off at a few expensive handicraft emporiums on the way, so that they can get commissions. No purchases are necessary, only looking. The catch is when the number of emporiums to be visited increases from “a few” to at least 5 or 6, so that the driver can maximize his commissions.

The sales people in the emporiums don’t let potential customers get away easily, so such an exercise can end up taking hours. If you want to reach your destination promptly or don’t want to be caught up in what will feel like endless browsing, it’s best to give this offer a miss and pay the full taxi fare. – Tripsavvy

I found this same scam in Egypt. You find yourself ferried to locations that provide a kickback to the taxi driver that you had no interest in visiting. This type of coercion is accepted in many Muslim countries, India, and most likely other places I have just not yet seen.

Go to top

Conclusion

The answer to the question posed by this article’s title is yes. Indian culture is dishonest. I don’t know what other word describes Indian behavior accurately and succinctly.

When they first arrived in India, the British found Indian dishonesty and noted it immediately. Indians like to blame just about everything on the British, but being dishonest is something that the British culture brought to India.

What Mass Immigration of Unethical Indians Means to Countries That Receive Them

Indians are significantly degrading the lives of non-Indians in all of the countries where Indians immigrate. And to understand why it is essential to know that Indians are bringing their culture from India.

  • Since independence, India has made no observable social reforms but has grown its population. For example, India is one of the worst places to be a woman, and it trades places for this “honor,” with Afghanistan for the worst every other year.
  • Indians strongly support abuse, and many of them are themselves abusive and consider it normal to abuse those of a lower caste than them. Abuse is rampant in workplaces as well as I cover in the article How the Awful Indian Employment System Works.
  • Indian mismanagement of their country has created an increased desperation level, and Indians then bring this culture to where they immigrate.

Being On Guard

All non-Indians need to be on guard regarding the Indian culture. Given their track record. Things to be aware of for non-Indians dealing with Indians.

  • If you are speaking to an Indian or working with an Indian, they are likely lying to you.
  • If you take a job with an Indian company, you must expect horrible treatment and a short tenure with the employer.
  • If you work with an Indian recruiter, expect to be discriminated against. As a non-Indian, you will never be treated fairly. There is no concept of fair treatment in India.
  • If you interview with a company that includes Indian interviewers, expect Indians to discriminate against you in favor of a friend from this caste and social circle who wants that job.
  • If you have Indian co-workers, be careful what you tell them. Indians have an established pattern of targeting the jobs of non-Indians, and then reporting the person as underperforming, and then recommending their Indian friends.

The only thing Indians have ever done is create exploitative systems. And they are recreating these systems in Western countries where they have immigrated.

Multinationals expanded these programs to allow Indians into Western countries to increase the profit margin but at the expense of the domestic population. The overall intent of these multinationals was always to lower the wages of domestic workers, which is covered in the article The Multiple Ways that The H1-B Visa Program Reduces US Wages, the interests of Indians are in direct opposition to the working populations in the countries to which they immigrate.

Indian IT Survey Results

To see our ongoing survey, which includes graphs of responses and specific comments from domestic workers all over the world who have had to work with Indians, see the website indianitsurvey.com

Sharing This Article

Share this article with someone you know by copying this article link and pasting it into your email so they can read the same information.