Oronyodeb @anindya_a1 - Twitter Profile

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3 days ago

25 years of working. Story no. 2. Sometime in 2009 I was working at the Mint office in Delhi. I was still in the weekend team and hadn't yet joined the digital team as Managing Editor. One day I was asked to write a profile of a then celebrity entrepreneur who was running a national chain of retail stories. In fact at the time he was India's largest retailer of mobile phones. I was handed this job because the entrepreneur was an IIMA alumnus, and so was I, and I had some access to alumni networks, people who went to school with him and so on. At the time the company was going through some turmoil. But they had just acquired a logistics firm, and talking heads on TV were talking about how this was going to turn things around. The one problem they had was logistics, the experts said. This acquisition was a super smart move. The channels even had investors come on air to discuss the whole thing. So as part of my profile research I checked out the logistics company's website. And I was like: wait. This is just a Wordpress template with minor tweaks. There was nothing here. There was no sign at all that this was an actual company. No sign of contact details either. But then I checked the domain registry, looked at the WHOIS information, and got a phone number in Chennai. An old man picked up. Said nothing and hung up. Weird. So then I decided to look at the source code of the website. Because back in the day web developers often left comments or a trail of info in the source code. I could clearly see this was a shoddy, low-effort thing. That had been put together just days before the announcement. So weird. And so I had a word with the editors and then called up the celebrity entrepreneur's company. I didn't go through the usual PR channel. Instead I just called up their HO in Chennai. Guess what? The same old man picked up. I immediately knew what was going on. This dude was acquiring an entirely fake company that he himself had created, in order to desperately siphon funds out of the parent company. Two hours later we noticed that several previous acquisitions had been similar frauds. The next day we broke the story, the investors sued him, and the dude eventually went to jail. For someone in the weekend team to get a Page One story was pretty rare. But to have one with this impact was rarer still. And all because I decided to make a few phone calls and look at the source code of a website or two. Something that none of the TV channels thought to do for days and days even as they covered the story breathlessly. Moral of the story: Always always always look at the details. Forensic journalism is the best. I still do some of it these days. But mostly pass on the leads to working journalists and so on. But friends, there are always trails. Always. Look into almost any corporate announcement closely enough and you will see stories that you are not supposed to.

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