I once got caught up in one of these . I was young , poor and had failed in my engineering exams. I had no coding skills, but was hoping some company would pick me up based on my math skills and train me (that is what most MNCs in india like Infosys do). I was attending different tech job fairs, but would get screened out at the beginning itself because of my lack of degree. But then one company was fine with it and interviewded me but only after the HR round was over did they say that they were a BPO . They claimed to have tie up with a big MNC in india , and so off I went to join.

On my first day, I was given a script to learn and placed near a senior guy to listen in on his phone call to learn from him. The scam was simple, they had a website similar in name to yellowpages.com but not the real thing. They would call up small businesses (mom and pop stores) in the US and tell them their yellowpages listing was chargeable from that year, and if they don't pay 500$ , it would be removed. If someone other than the owner was attending the phone and said they don't want it , they would use scare tactics like ,"this would get your listing removed.Are you authorized to do that ?" etc. The main targets were old people and less technologically savvy ones I guess. Once someone agreed , the call was routed to another team some place else.

Long story short, I didn't go back after the first day- but my friend chose to stay back. Many of them who attended the interview did . I don't have contact with any of them , but now I wonder how many of them turned to bigger scams. None of them had joined there thinking they would be scamming people. At no point in the interview process did the company appear to be scam artists.

If anyone is wondering what I did after that, I borrowed some money, checked out the cheapest training course available near by - it turned out to be php (around 120$) and I landed a web dev role in 4 months.