Ahmedabad ₹1.5 Crore Crypto Scam: A Quick Fortune Farce

by

Key Highlights

  • Ahmedabad’s bewhiskered authorities bopped a ₹1.5 crore crypto scam, laying hands on six rascals who peddled a fake investment show to folks across several states through social media and messaging chatter.
  • Gujarat’s commercial capital is swaggering into the cyber-fraud parade, with 694 cases worth ₹134.45 crore reported in a mere couple of years.
  • The trick was old as a wooden nickel: show a sultry little return, nudge folks to drop in more, then vanish like a rooster at dawn, with funds slipping away through crypto wallets so sneaky you’d think they wore capes.

Ahmedabad police have knocked another crypto racket on the head, this time grabbing six characters tied to a ₹1.5 crore multi-state scam that lured victims via fake digital asset platforms. The scoop, first aired by NDTV, fits neatly into a growing line of crypto-tinged mischief traced back to Gujarat’s bustling port of commerce and stories, Ahmedabad.

Those arrested allegedly ran a sham crypto trading outfit that dangled outsized returns in front of hopeful investors. People from several states were drawn in by social-media whisperings and dim-messenger chatter before being told to deposit funds into wallets under the control of the accused.

The game plan is as familiar as a mule’s kick: give folks a taste of small payoffs to build trust, twist the screws with heftier deposits, and then-poof!-the air goes out of the balloon when withdrawals are tried. The money hops from rupees to crypto wallets and away, untraceable as a shadow at dusk.

What makes this yarn worth a reader’s while is not merely the ₹1.5 crore tally. It’s where it happened, how it happened, and what it says about the infrastructure that keeps Ahmedabad-and the wider Gujarat boat afloat-as recurring names in India’s crypto crime ledger.

Ahmedabad’s cybercrime problem is getting harder to ignore

Data presented to the Gujarat Legislative Assembly show Ahmedabad logged 694 cyber-fraud cases between February 2024 and January 2026, totaling ₹134.45 crore in losses. The police did manage to claw back ₹49.01 crore and hauled in 664 accused across 315 traced cases. The Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Station alone accounted for 238 of those cases, with Krishnagar and Naroda stations close behind at 22 and 21 respectively.

These are no penny-ante misadventures. In February 2026, the Crime Branch nabbed Sujit Shankarrao Dev, a 47-year-old software expert who’d been skipping town for nearly two years after cheating over 100 investors in a crypto venture worth more than ₹100 crore. He’d set up a crypto investment shop in Mumbai’s Dahisar in 2021, vouching for returns up to four times the stake via supposed trading and mining schemes. After cleaning up crores, he vanished; investigators tracked him down with electronic eyes and tips from Mumbai Police, catching him near the Ahmedabad airport.

Separately, mid-2025 saw Ahmedabad’s Cyber Crime Brigade team up with Binance’s Financial Intelligence Unit to bust a ₹1.65 crore cross-border “digital arrest” scam. The fraudsters posed as lawmen from afar, luring victims from Gujarat to Nepal under false pretenses, squeezing funds through a potpourri of psychological pressure and crypto laundering. The trail ran from Indian mule bank accounts to crypto wallets tied to outfits in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

In another 2025 instance, Odisha’s CID snagged five people from Gujarat-Surat-for cheating a businessman in Ganjam of ₹6.16 crore in a crypto pitch that began with a social-media whisper from a woman posing as a tech pro.

The throughline is plain: multi-state operations, digital-first victimization, and crypto acting as the exit ramp for stolen cash.

Why scammers keep choosing crypto

Reckon it ain’t a mystery why crypto keeps taking center stage in these capers. The tricks are easier than pulling a rabbit from a hat, once you’ve got the hang of it.

First, pseudonymity. While crypto transactions leave marks on public ledgers, wallet addresses aren’t tied to real identities unless a fellow bows to Know Your Customer on a regulated exchange. Scammers prefer non-custodial wallets, decentralized exchanges, and peer-to-peer setups that dodge identity checks, letting them frolic in the shadows.

Second, speed and irreversibility. Once a blockchain confirms a transfer, it’s as final as a legal ban on snooping. No chargebacks, no middleman to step in, and no one to say “please come again.” For a wildcat, that means once the victim presses send, the money’s gone like a snowball in a furnace.

Third, cross-border motion. Converts stolen rupees into USDT or Bitcoin and flits the loot to handlers in distant lands in minutes, not days. In the Ahmedabad Binance case, the funds moved from Indian banks into crypto and then on to wallets run from Cambodia and Nepal.

Fourth, layering. The crooks split stolen crypto into a hundred micro-transfers, ride through mixers, swap between tokens and chains, and end up reconverting through high-risk exchanges or crypto-to-cash desks. By the time investigators trace the first hop, the funds have shimmied through a dozen wallets across different rails.

India’s government has noticed. The PRAHAAR strategy, released in early 2026, flags the rising use of crypto wallets by criminal and terrorist outfits. A dedicated darknet and cryptocurrency task force lives under the Multi-Agency Centre. And the Union Budget 2025-2026 earmarked ₹782 crore for cybersecurity projects. But for most victims, the enforcement lag resembles a slow mule-hard to catch up to the pace of the mischief.

How they get caught – and what mistakes they make

Despite crypto’s veneer of anonymity, miscreants keep getting caught, and the blunders they make look embarrassingly familiar.

The biggest blunder is the fiat on-ramp and off-ramp. No matter how many wallets they smear with, the stolen money starts as rupees in a victim’s bank account and ends up as rupees in the crook’s. That’s bank KYC, transaction records, and UPI logs marching backward like a determined parade, laying down a trail investigators can follow.

In the ₹100 crore Ahmedabad case, Dev was tracked by electronic eyes and cross-city cooperation. In the Odisha-Gujarat affair, police recovered mobile phones, bank books, debit cards, and WhatsApp chatter linking the accused to the rascally business.

Mule accounts offer a weak spot. Scammers hire third-party bank accounts-rented or stolen-to take in and move funds. But these mule accounts belong to real folks with real Aadhaar numbers and phones. Freeze a mule, pull its KYC, and the chain begins to crumble.

In the ₹1.65 crore cross-border case, arresting a single account renter gave investigators the thread to map the entire network-and that’s a fine thing, since a single thread can unravel a whole tapestry.

Next, there’s communication metadata. Crooks lean on WhatsApp, Telegram, and encryption to coordinate and chat with victims. But call records, IPs, and device data can still be wrung out through lawful channels.

In the multi-state ₹2.27 crore digital-arrest caper busted in Ahmedabad just last month, police traced the misused money across bank accounts in Bihar, Haryana, and West Bengal using a trail map and careful analysis before striking in coordinated fashion.

And let us not forget human error: not knowing when to quit. Dev, the ₹100 crore rogue, kept living in Naroda even with Mumbai Police on his tail. Harshik Mukeshbhai Patel, a 26-year-old from Ahmedabad, was nabbed in a separate ₹1.5 crore case in 2025 and picked up near Chandkheda in Gandhinagar. Snug as a bug in a rug, until the law came knocking.

Scammers who stay in familiar towns, keep up a public face, and cling to known numbers are easy to spot. A lookout circular, or a tip, and the jig is up.

The bigger picture: Gujarat and India’s crypto fraud epidemic

This latest Ahmedabad arrest comes as crypto-linked mischief is stalking India from every direction.

More than 24 lakh cybercrime complaints were filed on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal in 2025, with losses totaling ₹22,495 crore. The recovery rate sits at a paltry clip-of the ₹36,448 crore in cumulative losses since the portal’s birth, only ₹60.52 crore has been returned to victims.

Gujarat has a taste for big crypto mischief. BitConnect still stands out as the granddaddy-an international Ponzi scheme run by a Gujarat-raised fellow named Satish Kumbhani, with his US-based firm. The Enforcement Directorate seized cryptocurrency worth ₹1,646 crore from Gujarat-linked devices in February 2025, the largest single-day crypto seizure by any Indian agency. In January 2026, the ED arrested two more figures tied to BitConnect after tracing extorted Bitcoins through stray crypto accounts, with funds eventually looped into Ethereum and USDT.

And just last month, the CBI nabbed its first scalp in the ₹20,000 crore GainBitcoin saga-catching Darwin Labs co-founder Ayush Varshney at a Mumbai airport as he tried to hop a flight to Sri Lanka. That investigation has already yielded crypto worth ₹23 crore seized and keeps widening across states.

For Ahmedabad specifically, the arc is clear. The city isn’t merely a passive host but an active hub-a place where accused individuals set up shop, lease out bank accounts, and run multi-state fraud networks while playing hide-and-seek in broad daylight.

The ₹1.5 crore case may seem modest next to the ₹100 crore and ₹1,646 crore specters that have walked before it. Yet it’s the mid-size, multi-state mischiefs that paint the biggest picture of India’s crypto crime beast: they touch the most people, and they’re the hardest to prevent.

Police urge citizens to steer clear of offers promising guaranteed returns, to verify any platform with SEBI before stumping up money, and to report fraud at once via the national helpline 1930 or the nearest cybercrime station. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is-so spare yourself the ride and tell a friend to stay away from the digital carnival.

Read More

2026-04-02 15:39