Explained: The Mumbai Memory Card Scam

The memory card scam is one of the few scams that can get a chuckle out of the most hardened Mumbaikar.Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has had its more than fair share of scams. We routinely read about scams worth crores. But that doesn’t mean Mumbai is home to only major and complicated scams. The city has had its fair share of less-than-enterprising small-time scamsters who have faded away with time and technology. One such breed of scams that had its heyday about fifteen years ago was the memory scam at railway stations.

Mobile phones in the 2000s became the next big thing and the complete entertainment-on-the-go device. The memory card became an integral part of the mobile phone. It was all about the storage that the memory card offered. That was because mobiles at that time either didn’t offer big internal memories or didn’t offer them at all. Online and streaming entertainment were still a far-fetched idea. People used to pay shopkeepers to fill up memory cards with songs and movies.

Memory cards and entertainment on the go were such a big market at one point that a major music company even dabbled in selling memory cards with their licensed music on them. I know, the idea seems a bit far-fetched in 2025, but here’s an article that talks about it.

The Mumbai Memory Card Scam

As the article says, a typical 4 GB memory card was worth around INR 500. It wasn’t a princely amount, given that the phone would cost between INR 5K and 15 K. But the price-conscious Mumbai customer, looking for a great deal, was always looking around.

Add to this the fact that the Mumbai Railways is the lifeline of the city that never sleeps. A typical Mumbaikar spends at least two hours every day in a train or at the railway platform. So, vendors selling cheap stuff at these railway platforms and trains routinely make a quick buck. From clothes to vegetables, the Mumbaikar can buy anything and everything depending on where they are.

Exploiting all this, conmen came with fake memory cards. What makes this scam memorable is the sheer boldness of the scammers. They knew they were selling plastic in broad daylight-or evening—and yet carried it all with impunity, unlike a cyber criminal who apologises to his victim once he is confronted.

The conmen would typically spot someone who was in a hurry and looked upwardly mobile. They would offer them a memory card for cheap, almost 1/5th the price of what they would buy it for in a shop. Some even showed the goods, a shiny piece of metal in its seemingly ‘original’ packing. The prospective buyer would find the price lucrative. It would go lower if the person could haggle better; the deal would happen within minutes.

However, when the buyer actually checks the memory card, they find that it’s a worthless piece of plastic painted as a memory card. When the person would go to complain about the fake goods, the vendor was nowhere to be seen.

Why The Mumbai Memory Card Scam Ended

The scam became so rampant that the original scamsters, the ones who sold ‘procured’ goods at the railway stations, had to show that the memory card was a genuine one to sell. However, the death knell of the Mumbai memory card scam was sounded with cheaper mobile phones that had inbuilt memory cards. Also, with the herald of ultra-expensive mobile phones, nobody would dare put an INR 100 piece of metal in the circuit.

That’s not to say that memory cards are totally out of action. Photographers and videographers still depend on them. However, most of them either buy them online or have trusted shops they have been buying from for decades.

Is it possible that the memory card scam will resurge soon? Crime buffs would say that memory cards could once again become a thing, with dumb phones making a comeback. However, these phones are pretty cheap, and nobody will be waiting until next month to get a 128 GB memory card.

The Vigilant Blog

Covers the crime beat, spreading awareness about crimes, scams and everything dastardly.

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