Sixty thousand rupees and a dream: how Achievers Club built a pyramid on youth

I. The Call

The phone rings on a Tuesday afternoon in a room that is barely a room. A mattress, a desk, a charging cable that never quite reaches. He is twenty-two years old and he has been out of college for eight months and nothing has happened yet.

The voice on the other end is warm. Practiced. It moves the way water moves, around every objection before the objection fully forms. There is an opportunity, the voice says. There are people earning real money. There is a club, and the club is not for everyone, but for the right person, the returns are significant. Life-changing, actually. The voice uses that word. Life-changing.

He has heard pitches before. Everyone his age has heard pitches. The voice knows this, and so it does not sound like a pitch. It sounds like a conversation between two people who understand something that most people miss.

The entry fee is ₹30,000. About $360. Several weeks of earnings for someone his age in a tier-two city, if the earnings are there at all.

He asks about the products. The voice has an answer for that. He asks about the returns. The voice has an answer for that too. He asks if this is one of those pyramid things and the voice laughs, warmly, like he just asked if the sky is purple. Of course not. This is Achievers Club. This is legitimate. This is how the people at the top got to the top.

He does not know that sixty people in a room in Karmanghat, Hyderabad have been trained to have that exact conversation. He does not know that the voice has had this conversation perhaps fifty times today. He does not know that on the other side of the country, in Gurugram, Haryana, a sixty-one-year-old man named Harish Kumar Singla allegedly built the room those sixty voices work in.

He only knows that ₹30,000 feels like a door, and he has been standing in the hallway long enough.

That part is not stupidity. That part is twenty-two years old in a country that has been telling you since birth that there is a door and you just have not found it yet.

II. The Floor

Picture the call centre. Not the polished version, the real version.

Sixty desks. Sixty headsets. A whiteboard somewhere with numbers on it, because there are always numbers on the whiteboard. The air conditioning works most days. The team leads walk the floor and the team leads have their own targets.

Nobody outside the operation has been inside that specific room in Karmanghat. Not on the record, not yet. But investigators confirmed its existence and its staffing, and anyone who has worked a phone room does not need to imagine much.

The script is not called a script. It is called training material, or talking points, or onboarding. It covers the objection about pyramid schemes. It covers the objection about the fee. It has a reframe for every hesitation, because the hesitations are finite, and the script has been refined across every hesitation the callers encountered before.

The product being sold is called a membership or a business opportunity, the language varies. What the product actually produces is a new set of phone numbers to call.

That is the machine. You pay to enter. You earn by recruiting. The recruits pay to enter. They earn by recruiting. Each layer feeds the layer above it. At the top, the money pools. At the bottom, the new entries are still waiting for the layer below them to arrive.

The layer below them does not always arrive.

That is not turbulence. That is the design.

Multi-level marketing, or MLM, is a legal structure in which salespeople earn commissions both on their own sales and on the sales of the people they recruit. Some companies run legitimate versions of this. But when the primary income comes from recruitment fees rather than actual product sales to real customers outside the network, regulators call it a pyramid scheme. The Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, India's primary law against these structures, has been on the books since 1978. Since 2007, investigators have identified more than 5,200 MLM scams in India. In 2025 alone, 841 new ones were detected.

The law exists. The machine keeps running. Because the machine is not deterred by law. It is deterred by recognition.

He did not recognize it yet.

III. The Number

₹600 crore.

Take a moment with that.

That is roughly $72 million USD, based on current exchange rates. That is what investigators believe flowed through this operation. One lakh participants, meaning approximately 100,000 people. Each paying ₹30,000.

Do the math.

One hundred thousand times thirty thousand rupees is exactly ₹300 crore. So either the participation was higher than one lakh, or individual victims paid more than once, or participated at multiple levels, or the ₹600 crore figure includes downstream economic damage, compounded losses, the cost of what people borrowed to get in.

The investigation is ongoing. The ₹600 crore figure is what investigators believe, not what has been proven in a courtroom. Keep that distinction.

What has been confirmed is what was recovered: approximately ₹3 crore, frozen in accounts linked to the accused.

₹3 crore out of ₹600 crore.

Half of one percent.

The funnel moved efficiently. That is almost always the first thing you discover when you trace one of these cases backward. The money does not sit still. It moves fast, into multiple accounts, through layers of the network, and in some cases out of the country entirely. Whether that happened here, investigators have not yet said publicly.

But ₹3 crore frozen means ₹597 crore is somewhere else.

The young man who paid ₹30,000 will not be getting his portion of that somewhere else. The arithmetic does not reach him.

IV. The Man from Gurugram

Harish Kumar Singla is sixty-one years old. He lives in Gurugram, Haryana, a city built on corporate headquarters and aspirational real estate outside Delhi. He was described in reporting as a country sales manager at an unnamed private company.

According to the allegations filed against him, he created the fraudulent network.

This is worth sitting with for a moment. Not the arrest, not the charges. The construction.

Somewhere, in the years before this week, Singla allegedly designed a system. He allegedly hired sixty people to make phone calls. He allegedly created or deployed the Achievers Club as the face that would meet the marks. He allegedly established the entry fee, the commission structure, the recruiting incentives. He allegedly built, in other words, a funnel.

The three local agents arrested before him, Mohd Akram, Mohd Nouman Raza, and Mohd Aslam, were pieces of the distribution layer. They moved the product into communities where it would move easily. Local trust is an accelerant in these schemes. A face you know from the neighborhood, a voice with the right accent, a name your parents might recognize. Affinity fraud, the kind that spreads through communities and families, runs on that trust the way an engine runs on fuel.

The local agents recruit. The call centre recruits. The architecture recruits, because the architecture gives every current member a financial reason to find the next member.

Singla, the complaint alleges, sat at the top of that architecture.

He was not making calls. He was running the room that made the calls.

V. Who Was in the Funnel

The primary target was people aged eighteen to twenty-four.

Read that slowly.

The people who had not yet learned what money feels like when it leaves and does not come back. The people who are specifically susceptible to a pitch about changing your life because their lives have not yet taken the shape they were hoping for. The people who have watched wealth accumulate for other people on every screen they own and have been told, consistently, that the path is available if you find the right door.

The pitch for Achievers Club was built for exactly that psychological moment. The luxury lifestyle promise. The quick income. The sense of being selected for something not everyone gets access to.

He was not the only one. One lakh of him, spread across the country. Some in cities, some in smaller towns. Different names, different circumstances, same Tuesday afternoon, same warm voice, same ₹30,000.

The money they paid was often borrowed. That is another thing about these schemes that does not always make it into the headline numbers. The entry fee is not always savings. Sometimes it is a loan from a parent. Sometimes it is a credit facility. Sometimes it is the amount a person was holding in reserve for something else, something real.

When it is borrowed money that does not come back, the loss is not just the ₹30,000. It is the loan, the interest, the relationship damaged when you have to explain where the money went, the specific shame of that conversation.

The investigation does not capture that number. No investigation does.

VI. The Pattern That Was Already There

India has had this experience before. Not once. Not twice. More than 5,200 times since 2007, by the count of those who track these things.

The machine wears different names. The entry fees change. The commission structures adjust. The products shift from wellness supplements to digital tokens to memberships. But the structure is the same structure it has always been.

You are in. Pay to enter. Recruit to earn. The people above you already paid. The people below you have not arrived yet.

In 2025 alone, 841 new MLM scams were detected in India. That number does not include the ones not yet detected.

The callers in that room in Karmanghat were not the inventors of this. Some of them may not have fully understood what they were part of. They had a script and a target and a team lead walking the floor. Some of them were nearly the same age as the people they were calling.

That is one of the uglier mechanics of a pyramid. It recruits its own workforce from the same pool it targets for victims. The person calling you may have paid ₹30,000 themselves, six months ago, and is now calling because calling is the only way they get any of it back.

The machine does not care about the caller any more than it cares about the called.

VII. What Is Left

The accounts are frozen. Singla is in custody. The local agents are in custody. The call centre floor in Karmanghat is quiet.

Approximately ₹3 crore sits in frozen accounts while investigators try to trace where the rest went.

One lakh people are waiting for an answer that is unlikely to arrive in the form of a refund.

The young man in the room with the mattress and the charging cable does not know yet whether he will ever see his ₹30,000 again. He probably knows, the way you know something that you do not want to say out loud, that he will not. He knows because the month he was supposed to start earning came and the numbers on his screen did not move the way the voice said they would move.

He has not told his parents yet. He is working on how to say it.

The Achievers Club is not operating. But the machine is not the name on the door. The machine is the structure behind the name. The structure is legal to build, right up until it is not. The structure runs under new names every year, in every city in the country, because the structure works until it collapses and by the time it collapses the people at the top have already collected what they needed from the people at the bottom.

Eight hundred and forty-one new versions were detected in India in 2025.

This was one of them.

The others are still running.

He just needs to answer the phone.