A black Verna halts next to the glass doors of an airconditioned grocery store.

On this rolling rural Aravali landscape, both seem out of place to a visitor but draw no second looks from locals, who carry on with their lives next to such ostentatious displays in one of India's most backward district.

From the Verna emerge five young men.

They sport styled haircuts, spiked, shiny and strand-perfect, that look like an import from a parlour in Gurgaon or Delhi rather than a salon in Luhinga Kalan, a village that sits in a rocky part of Nuh near the Haryana-Rajasthan border.

The men breeze into the store and walk out minutes later with cans of energy drinks.

In a district with high unemployment, almost two-thirds of its population below the poverty line, and a limping local economy riven by a water crisis, the car and the drinks are a lifestyle statement that sprung up implausibly during the pandemic months.Houses with cams and 'guards' keep a watch on visitors here At Luhinga Kalan, as well as in the roads of neighbouring villages like Luhinga Khurd and Mahun, a KTM bike can suddenly pop out from behind an auto (these correspondents spotted five).

Hairstyling is evidently a good business idea, from the salons one frequently spots, some of them promising haircuts and beard trims like Bollywood stars and Indian cricketers.Outside the clusters of village houses, a construction boom appears poised to annex more of the rocky landscape.

Dozens of houses are taking shape along the roads, many multi-storeyed and resembling the city 'kothis'.

Along the rocky road that takes one further towards the Rajasthan border, new-found affluence manifests in glimpses - houses, cars, bikes, haircuts - like cherry blossoms in a desert.Much of this, police suspect, has come from the savings of thousands of conned Indians, primarily over the last three years.These three villages are part of a contiguous set of 40 - in Nuh and the adjoining Rajasthan districts of Alwar and Bharatpur - to which hundreds of thousands of scam calls have been traced by police from virtually every Indian state.

The biggest known hub of cyber fraud in the country today, the area has come to be referred to as 'new Jamtara' (after the Jharkhand town from which organised cybercrime emerged as a major threat).On April 27 this year, Haryana Police raided 300 places in this area in its largest field operation against cybercrime and detained 125 suspects, 65 of whom were later arrested.

In May, police linked the 'new Jamtara' network to around 28,000 cybercrime complaints and 1,346 FIRs filed across all Indian states and Union territories, except Lakshadweep."During interrogations, the accused told police that they consume crates of energy drinks to stay awake and work round-the-clock.

Some of them invested their earnings to build big houses, while some of them purchased power-motorcycles.

Others bought pieces of land," said Nuh superintendent of police Varun Singla (a grocery store owner in Mahun these correspondents spoke to said demand for energy drinks is high).Singla added that many KTM bikes had made it to the market for re-sale since the raids.

The manager of a KTM showroom in Gurgaon, said they sell 3-4 bikes on an average in a month to customers in Nuh.

KTM has opened a service centre in Sohna.

"Two models are sought after - RC-200 and 125 Duke," he said.

Those involved in agriculture, meanwhile, said they are unable to find farm hands to work in their fields.

"It is difficult to find a labourer.

Youths have money, and no one wants to work in the fields," said Mohammad Junaid, who said he owns more than 30 acres of land in Luhinga Kalan.Local support Investigators and experts said such large networks of cybercriminals thrive with support from locals, in part due to lack of employment opportunities.

In Nuh, like Jamtara, locals allowed use of their bank accounts to park and channel money scammed from frauds, police sources said.Kislay Chaudhary, a cyber expert based in Delhi, said both in Jamtara and Nuh, scammers used the money they made to build houses, purchase properties and invest in virtual currencies.

"Similarly, they have purchased cars and sports bikes," he told TOI, adding money is also put into criminal enterprise-building.

"A fraudster who is involved in SIM swapping will give his money to another fraudster who dupes people through loan applications.

This is how the whole system runs," he said.

Pavan Duggal, another Delhi-based cyber expert, said scammers also transfer money outside through hawala channels while investing in real estate, gold and cryptocurrency.

"They use cash to build houses, purchase cars and bikes and gold so that they can avoid transaction trials," he said.Eyes on the road Some lanes with newly built houses have CCTV cameras mounted, but those aren't the only sets of eyes.

A visitor, a new face in these parts, is closely watched.

At Mahun, these correspondents in a car with a Gurgaon registration number were stopped by three youngsters - one of whom asked about the destination while two others stood behind the car.Locals who declined to be named said the youths operate in a network that keeps an eye on the entry and exit of vehicles from other areas (the two youngsters standing behind the car were likely taking down the cab's registration number).

Most residents, though, won't talk to outsiders unless there is another local who can vouch for the person.Chaudhary said cybercrime networks employ locals as "guards".

"If you are going inside the villages with cops, then they will allow you to enter, but they will inform fraudsters about the police," he said.How successful were the April raids?Some locals who agreed to talk said that many of the criminals had information about the assembling police force in Gurgaon's Bhondsi before the raids this April.

"The actual culprits had fled by the time the cops came.

Around 20-25 people are absconding, while cops arrested six men from here," said a resident of Luhinga Kalan.The border nearby makes a getaway easy.

Bharatpur is a two-and-a-half-hour's drive from Luhinga Kalan and Mathura around two hours.

A resident of Mahun pointed to hillocks near the border as the place where calls are made from.

"Walk a few hundred metres further and you catch the network of Rajasthan.

On this side, you have the cell network of Haryana," he said.

Locals contest police's claim about the success of the April raid.

"Every single person got to know about the raid in the village before it happened.

And police arrested many people who weren't involved in cybercrimes," said Hasan Mohammad of Luhinga Kalan.Nuh police said they had done their research before the raid.

"We were preparing for one and a half months.

Our teams had visited the villages to figure out how to reach the houses of the suspects too," the SP said, adding cybercrimes had seen a decline since the raids too.