Financial Injustice: Predatory Relations and Urban Fraud in Jakarta

This talk explores the relational contours of financial fraud and economic vulnerability in Jakarta’s new economy. By focusing on the experiences of the disillusioned and the disenfranchised across a range of class backgrounds, I show how money and mobility and crime and capitalism intersect in a dense urban environment. Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, is considered the infrastructural and economic laboratory for Indonesia’s new economy. As e-commerce and fintech alter consumption patterns and shape urban entrepreneurial and lifestyle aspirations for millions of Indonesians, the risks and advantages associated with increased financialization have had a profound impact on ordinary citizens. Indonesians are increasingly drawn into everyday, data-rich transactions that habituate and concretize the practice of speculative consumption and interactions with strangers in the city. While the state celebrates the outward rise of financial inclusion, the financialization of everyday life has also produced victims of financial fraud and deceit, in particular through predatory scams (modus) that rely on legal and regulatory gaps and intimate knowledge of others to succeed. This paper probes the social conditions that enable fraud and its extralegal resolutions, emphasizing the destabilizing, extraordinary experiences of urban citizens who see no justice for the ways they have been conscripted into a dangerous new economy.