Ed Reveals Rs 600 Crore Crypto Fraud, Raids in Delhi and Mumbai, Bitcoin

In the last few years, the cases of fraud related to cryptocurrency have increased rapidly. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has conducted raids under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) in Delhi, Mumbai and Jaipur in terms of a fraud associated with the country’s crypto. This case is related to cheating with people by creating a fake website of Crypto Exchange.

The ED has stated in a press release that this fraud is worth about 600 crores. The investigation was launched after a report published in the newspaper. It was reported in this report that Chirag Tomar, an Indian citizen, was sentenced to jail in the US for cheating hundreds of people. In this case, Crypto Exchange was cheated by creating a fake website of Coinbase. In this, fake website used to show incorrect information on entering details related to the victims, so that users used to contact the phone number on this website. This phone was from a call center which Tomar and his companions used to run. These people used to transfer their holdings to their crypto wallets after taking access to the cryptocurrency account of the victims.

After this, the stolen cryptocurrency was sold. The investigation of the case has found that about Rs 15 crore was transferred to the bank accounts of Tomar and his family members. The ED has banned these bank accounts during the raids and seized around Rs 2.18 crore. Recently, ED has seized a cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,646 crore in an investigation into forgery under the guise of investment in securities. It was fraudulent with a large number of deposits. ED’s Ahmedabad office in Gujarat raided this fraud of sales of securities as investments through Bitconnect Lending Program.

The case was registered under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) after an FIR from the Crime Branch of Gujarat Police. In this, the ED had imposed a team of technical experts by the ED to investigate the transactions done in many crypto wallets and detect the controllers of these crypto wallets. The investigation found that many transactions were done through ‘Dark Web’, which was difficult to track them.

(This news has not been edited by the NDTV team. It has been published directly from the syndicate feed.)