I n the Bollywood film Bluffmaster! (2005), the eponymous character says, ‘ Hamare dhande mein na bandook chalti hai, na bomb, na chaku, chalta hai toh sirf ek hi cheez . . .
dimaag . . .
aur woh hamesha hamare saath rehta hai , loaded .’ (In our business of conning, we don’t need guns, bombs or knives, the only thing we need is our brains and that’s always ready, loaded.) Had Priya Seth seen the Abhishek Bachchan-Priyanka Chopra-Nana Patekar starrer? Because she was about to bring her A-Game to the world of conning.
Soon after moving to Jaipur, Priya lost interest in her studies. She was tempted by the lavish lifestyle her classmates had. She knew money was the only gateway.
And so while in her second year at Parishkar College, she started looking for a job. She knew her college degree wouldn’t be enough to help her secure the kind of life she aspired for. ‘The Rs 20,000 that I was sending her every month for her expenses didn’t cut it.
She wanted to be a crorepati,’ her father recalled. Priya would go on to tell the investigating officer Gur Bhoopendra Singh that she had come for her studies but got lost in the glitz and glamour. Priya searched newspapers and online sites that offered jobs to freshers.
There were jobs for typists (she wasn’t professionally trained to be one), for data entry (what is that? she asked) and for office secretary (that could be a start, she thought to herself). But it was an advertisement that said, ‘Earn Thousands Easily and .