Orissa police busts Rs 1000 cr crypto ponzi scheme, two accused arrested

Orrisa police’s Economic Offence Wing has busted a crypto-ponzi scam worth over Rs 1,000 crore, and has arrested two individuals allegedly involved in the scam, authorities announced on Monday.

The police arrested Gurtej Singh Sidhu, a native of Faridkot, Punjab, from Rajasthan and his associate Nirod Das of Bhadrak, Orissa.

The two accused allegedly ran a multilevel marketing scheme called STA Crypto. People were asked to participate in the scheme by locking in a certain amount of money for a fixed, short time period. They were promised returns on the principal amount.

The police said in a statement, “They have been using various propaganda tools to persuade people to join the scheme and earn huge money in a very short time.”

The perpetrators claimed that the return on said investments were generated through cryptocurrencies. Participants were also asked to recruit other people to STA Crypto in lieu of rewards, making it a multilevel marketing scheme, authorities noted.

The police have detected transactions of more than Rs 30 crore from Das’ Bank account. The scam is estimated to be worth more than Rs 1000 crore.

J N Pankaj, inspector-general of the Economic Offence Wing, Orissa Police said in a press statement, “We were chasing the accused for the past few days as he was frequently changing his location in places like Goa, Lonavala, Mumbai, Delhi, Faridkot, Bhatinda, Hanumangadh and Sri Ganganagar. A team of the Economic Offence Wing was tracking his movements.”

Orissa Police started investigating that matter after people from Bhadrak, Balasore, Bhubaneswar, Mayurbhanj, Jajpur, Kendrapara and Keonjhar districts of Orissa complained to have been duped in the scheme. Around 10,000 people from Orissa had invested in the scheme, the police noted.

They added that over 2 lakh people from Punjab, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Assam had also invested in the ponzi scheme.