‘There was a bigger story here, about a sophisticated scam, but also of a country that had digitised at breakneck speed without any guardrails’: Suparna Sharma

Congratulations on this immense win. How does it feel?

Surreal. All my journalistic life, I have dreamt of the Pulitzer Prize, followed Pulitzer winners and their work.

How did you find out that your graphic story ‘TrAPPed’, in collaboration with Anand RK and Natalie Pearson, had won?

It was the wee hours of May 5, 2026, I was livestreaming the announcements. I knew that the editors at Bloomberg had submitted our investigative graphic story for the Pulitzer Prize in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category. When Marjorie Miller, the Pulitzer administrator, mentioned the third finalist in this category -- Reuters’ team for their beautifully reported and illustrated story on scam centres in Southeast Asia -- I thought it was done. Our story was also a scam and two similar stories would hardly be nominated. Miller then announced the fourth finalist, ‘trAAPed’, and then she read out the names of the winners – Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, Natalie Obiko Pearson. I wanted to dive into the TV and hug her.

Tell us about ‘TrAPPed’, and why a visual medium for an investigative story?

It began with Jui Chakravorty, an editor with Bloomberg Asia, whose relative was digitally arrested in India. Jui took the idea of a deep-dive into the scam to Natalie, an investigative reporter based in Tokyo, and they took it to Bloomberg’s editors, Flynn McRoberts and Ken Armstrong. There was a bigger story here -- about this crazy, sophisticated scam, but also the story of a country, a rising economy, that had digitised at a breakneck speed without any guardrails. India’s economy went digital first, and only when this gave rise to a massive scam economy – that expanded from Jamtara to multi-storied scam centres in Southeast Asia – that the government and our banks started waking up to the need to put in safety measures. It was Amanda Cox’s idea to do a graphic story, because it’s a scam conducted entirely over the phone, where the victim is ‘jailed’ and conned through their phone screen. Cox, an editor with Bloomberg, is the big daddy of data journalism in America.

So once it was settled that this would be a print, text, and a graphic story, two separate Bloomberg teams interviewed illustrators and reporters to work on this story. I was one of the reporters they shortlisted. Flynn and Ken found Anand RK, who worked with Amanda and Nadja Popovich, a graphics editor.

How did all three of you work on the story from across multiple countries?

The process was hectic, elaborate, intense and fabulous. Natalie had shortlisted about 40 digital arrest scams in which the scammers had used the same script -- they had called the victim claiming to be from TRAI to say that a courier they sent had been stopped at Indian Customs. They said that the courier was linked to the victim's Aadhar Card Number and that the courier contained a large number of SIM cards, cash, drugs, and as per their investigation, they were involved in the Naresh Goyal money-laundering case.

Natalie shortlisted five cases which I investigated thoroughly. We zeroed in on Dr Ruchika Tandon’s case because she was the only victim brave enough to talk about her digital arrest in detail, and this was the only case in which the police was so thorough. The digital arrest scam is very elaborate and scammers operate in five-six different departments, in different locations. In most investigations, police have managed to trace and arrest only the bank account holders or people in whose name SIM cards have been issued. But in Dr Tandon’s case, the UP Police’s Special Task Force had arrested scammers from every unit of this scam, including a ‘crypto queen’, a glamorous, newly-wed former banker. We had to get granular details to reconstruct scenes, and this part of the reporting Natalie flew down from Tokyo. She is the best reporting partner I’ve had. And I think together with our editors, we made a pretty formidable reporting team.

Did you meet many victims, and many scammers? What were their stories like?

We met several scammers and many victims. Not many victims want to go public as they are traumatised. For the duration of the scam, they live in a hostage-type situation in the very space they considered safe, their home. They are isolated, intimidated, harassed and watched 24x7. And when they come out of the scam, they have not just lost all their money, but even faith in themselves. Victims get shamed a lot. Their friends, children, relatives, cops, media, neighbours, everyone asks how could they fall for a scam.

Dr Tandon, a brilliant neurologist, was really courageous. She met me several times, despite the fact that of the Rs 2.8 crore that she lost, only about Rs 17 lakh had been recovered. The only reason she spoke was to make people more aware. Scammers have a very believable script. They send official-looking documents from the ED, CBI, Supreme Court to the victims. They hold meetings with the victim over video calls dressed in uniform, sitting in a set to resemble a police station. Some scammers threaten jail, others pose as good cops promising help if you send money to a supposed RBI account for verification. Scammers mostly fall in two categories – educated, tech-savvy youth who have grown up on the promise of India as a land of opportunities but not found suitable jobs. The others who are driven by remorseless greed.

We spoke with victims of all ages. One was a young techie, some were doctors, some were running big businesses.

India prides itself as a digital savvy nation. Do you see the contradictions between this idea and reality?

India is a digitally savvy nation. The problem is that the scammers are savvier than you, me and the cops. They can open or rent corporate bank accounts, use bank accounts of poor, unsuspecting people. They can issue and operate SIM cards in your name. They use illegal software to transfer crores of rupees into hundreds of accounts in a matter of seconds and then they turn it all into crypto currency which Indian authorities can’t trace or recover. So the reality is that while we have gone digital, criminals have also gone digital, and they are much more organised than our banks and authorities.

Tell us a little about your career?

I started working in 1991 with a small travel magazine in Delhi. One of my first interviews was with Arundhati Roy when she taught aerobics at the Taj Palace Hotel, many years before she wrote ‘The God of Small Things’. She said to me women should stay fit and be able to lift their typewriter themselves.

From there I moved to the ‘Sunday Observer’, then ‘Delhi Mid-Day’ and ‘The Asian Age’ where I started covering crime and became the chief reporter. I had written a story on the privileged life that Charles Sobhraj had in Tihar Jail. My colleague Meenal Baghel and I were selected for the Chevening Scholarship in the UK. When I returned to India, I joined a special investigations team that Shekhar Gupta had set up at ‘The Indian Express’. I worked under Ritu Sarin in Delhi, covering the CBI, IB, CAG, Tihar Jail, crime and criminals.

I wrote a different story from the one that a source at the Intelligence Bureau had tried to plant — the IB had been trailing Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, whenever he would come to Delhi for medical treatment. The IB official wanted me to write a story about a supposed affair Malik was having with a Delhi-based journalist. The story that I eventually wrote was about the IB wasting time on chasing Malik in the bushes around India Gate. I then moved to the Northeast where I covered insurgency and did some investigative stories on corruption and elections in Assam and Nagaland. In Assam, my then husband and I, who was a journalist with ‘India Today’, were returning from a friend’s house one night in an auto and were randomly picked up by the cops and beaten up.

Then when my son was born, I took a break from reporting and did editing jobs. When he was about 10, I returned to ‘The Asian Age’ as its Resident Editor. I didn’t have time for reporting, but I did film reviews and covered international film festivals for about 14 years. I quit that job in 2022.

You are as revered as a cinema critic as you are as a ‘serious’ news journalist. How do you navigate this dichotomy?

Film criticism is as much a piece of journalism. I enjoy writing on cinema as much as I enjoy investigating crime and criminals.

It’s interesting as you are still telling stories but in a different format. Can you tell us your thoughts on journalism today? 

I think the state of Indian journalism is both pathetic and inspiring. The Indian government has done its utmost to discredit journalists in the last decade or so. It has used big businesses to buy journalists and media houses, or used investigating agencies to intimidate them into silence. This environment has also given rise to many independent, brilliant journalists who will not be silenced, who will, through crowd-sourcing or starting their own YouTube channel, report the truth. For them and most freelance journalists, it is a terribly challenging time. Most media house editors seem to think that they are doing freelance journalists a favour when they commission a story. The sort of money they pay for stories is offensive.

Before the Pulitzer came, I can’t recall how many times my journalist friends told me, ‘Indian journalism is dead. Do something else’. Indian journalism is not dead. Indian journalists just need a few editors who have a spine and will invest in them and in stories.