iWorld
News9 Plus’ investigative documentaries expose online scams
Mumbai: As part of its year-end programming, News9 Live presents ‘Devil in my Phone’, a special series featuring investigative stories of News9 Plus journalists Gulam Jeelani and Shantasree Sarkar, who uncover the dark truths behind the menace of online sextortion and cybercrime rackets.
‘Devil in my Phone’ is available on News9 Plus, the world’s first news OTT, and is a brutal and unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the internet in India. Featuring two episodes – ‘Sextortion’ and ‘Hackers for Hire’, it explores the reasons behind the rise in this insidious new-age financial fraud, and the response by victims and law enforcement.
In ‘Hackers for Hire’, Shantasree Sarkar interviews online financial fraud victims, police officials and a real-life black hat hacker. Starting with the seemingly innocuous origins of these crimes – a SIM card, a smartphone and basic training, the documentary uncovers the full extent of the damage, to the tune of a shocking Rs 239 crore from the state of Rajasthan alone.
Casting much-need light on the other dark corner of this phenomenon, Gulam Jeelani takes a close look at the sinister mechanisms employed by ‘Sextortion’ scamsters, including the use of pornography, fake videos and the threat of social exposure, to defraud unsuspecting victims of lakhs of rupees. While law enforcement struggles to react in time, victims of sextortion are often driven to bankruptcy or suicide, fearing the social repercussions of public knowledge about the incident.
Both documentaries converge on one bizarre but indisputable fact: more than half of all reported cyber-crimes in India originate from the Mewat region, near the national capital Delhi. Speaking for the episode ‘Hackers for Hire’, Ravi Prakash Meharda, the Director General of Police, Cyber Crime in Rajasthan breaks down the moving parts of this well-oiled machine, from the sourcing of SIM cards from across the country, to the advantageous natural topography of the region, and finally to the installation and use of ATMs in the villages where cyber criminals use their ill-gotten gains for personal ends.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect that ‘Devil in my Phone’ lays bare is that even law enforcement officials are not safe. Amit Dubey, a cyber security expert and the head of Product Security at Dream11, recounts in the episode ‘Sextortion’ how over 150 law enforcement officers in UP have been victims of sextortion in the last year alone.
In fine detail, the two episodes of ‘Devil in my Phone’ unearth the facts to put in focus a worrisome picture – there are over 2000 cyber-crime complaints lodged in India on a daily basis, with 42% of Indians having fallen prey to such crimes in the last three years. In sextortion cases, fewer than one percent of incidents are actually reported, due to the social stigma it carries.
Featuring appearances from Deputy Commissioner of Delhi Police Prashant Gautam, cyber psychologist and V4WEB director Nirali Bhatia, cyberlaw expert Karnika Seth and Nuh Superintendent of Police Varun Singla, among others, ‘Devil in my Phone’ brings to the fore a pressing issue at a time when India’s internet-using population is at the highest it has ever been, with a steady uptick in the number of users expected in coming years.
Both episodes of ‘Devil in my Phone’ were also broadcast on News9 Live, the 24×7 live streaming platform that represents TV9 Network’s connected-TV offering as part of the News9 Mediaverse.
‘Devil in my Phone’ can be watched on News9 Plus:
https://www.news9plus.com/shortvideo/sextortion
https://www.news9plus.com/shortvideo/hackers-for-hire
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
