Key Highlights
- Ahmedabad police busted a ₹1.5 crore crypto scam and arrested six accused who ran a fake investment platform targeting victims across multiple Indian states through social media and messaging apps.
- Ahmedabad is emerging as a key centre in India’s cyber fraud surge, with 694 cases worth ₹134.45 crore reported in just two years.
- The scam followed a familiar pattern where victims were shown small initial returns, pushed to invest more, and then cut off, with funds moved through crypto wallets to avoid tracking.
Ahmedabad police have dismantled yet another cryptocurrency fraud network, this time arresting six people involved in a ₹1.5 crore multi-state scam that lured victims through fake digital asset investment platforms.
The operation, first reported by NDTV, is the latest in a growing pattern of crypto-enabled financial crimes being traced back to Gujarat’s commercial capital.
The arrested individuals allegedly operated a fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platform that promised investors outsized returns on their deposits. Victims from multiple states were drawn in through social media outreach and messaging apps before being directed to deposit funds into wallets controlled by the accused.
The playbook is one Indian investigators have seen dozens of times over the past year — small initial payouts to build trust, followed by escalating deposit demands, and eventually, complete radio silence when victims tried to withdraw.
What makes this case worth paying attention to is not just the ₹1.5 crore figure on its own. It is where it happened, how it happened, and what it tells us about the infrastructure that continues to make the city of Ahmedabad — and the Gujarat state more broadly — a recurring name in India’s crypto fraud landscape.
Ahmedabad’s cybercrime problem is getting harder to ignore
According to data presented in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly earlier this year, Ahmedabad recorded 694 cyber fraud cases between February 2024 and January 2026, involving a total of ₹134.45 crore. Police managed to recover ₹49.01 crore and arrested 664 accused individuals across 315 traced cases.
The Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police Station alone accounted for 238 of those cases, with Krishnagar and Naroda police stations following at 22 and 21, respectively.
These are not small-time operations. In February 2026, Ahmedabad’s Crime Branch arrested Sujit Shankarrao Dev, a 47-year-old software specialist who had been absconding for nearly two years after allegedly cheating over 100 investors in a cryptocurrency investment scam worth more than ₹100 crore.
Dev had set up a crypto investment office in Mumbai’s Dahisar area back in 2021, promising returns of up to four times the invested amount through supposed crypto trading and mining schemes.
After collecting crores from investors, he allegedly diverted the funds and vanished. Crime Branch officers eventually tracked him down using electronic surveillance and tip-offs from Mumbai Police, arresting him near the Ahmedabad airport.
Separately, in mid-2025, Ahmedabad’s Cyber Crime Branch worked with Binance’s Financial Intelligence Unit to dismantle a ₹1.65 crore cross-border “digital arrest” scam. In that case, fraudsters posing as law enforcement officers lured victims from Gujarat all the way to Nepal under false pretences, extracting funds through a combination of psychological intimidation and crypto laundering. The money trail stretched from mule bank accounts in India to crypto wallets linked to syndicates operating out of Cambodia and Southeast Asia.
And in a case from 2025, Odisha’s CID arrested five people from Gujarat — specifically from Surat — for cheating a Ganjam-based businessman of ₹6.16 crore in a crypto investment scam that also started with a social media approach by a woman posing as a tech professional.
The pattern is consistent: multi-state operations, digital-first victim acquisition, and crypto as the exit ramp for stolen money.
Why scammers keep choosing crypto
The reason cryptocurrency keeps showing up at the centre of these scams is not complicated, but it is worth spelling out.
Traditional bank transfers leave a trail that investigators can follow relatively quickly. Banks are subject to KYC norms, accounts can be frozen, and inter-bank communication is well-established. Crypto, on the other hand, offers scammers a set of advantages that the banking system simply does not.
First, pseudonymity. While cryptocurrency transactions are recorded on public blockchains, wallet addresses are not directly tied to real-world identities unless the holder has gone through KYC on a regulated exchange. Scammers routinely use non-custodial wallets, decentralized exchanges, and peer-to-peer platforms that do not require identity verification to move funds around without revealing who they are.
Second, speed and irreversibility. Once a crypto transaction is confirmed on the blockchain, it cannot be reversed. There is no chargeback mechanism, no hold period, and no intermediary to intervene. For a scammer, this means the money is gone the moment the victim hits send.
Third, cross-border movement. Converting stolen rupees into USDT or Bitcoin and transferring them to wallets controlled by handlers in China, Dubai, or Southeast Asia takes minutes, not days. In the Ahmedabad Binance case, investigators found that the money was funnelled from Indian bank accounts into crypto and then routed through wallets linked to operators in Cambodia and Nepal.
In a separate Hyderabad case from late 2025, three arrested individuals were found converting cheated amounts into USDT and sending them to wallet addresses provided by a Chinese national via Telegram.
Fourth, layering. Scammers split stolen crypto into hundreds of microtransactions, route them through mixing services, swap between different tokens and blockchains, and eventually reconvert into fiat currency through high-risk exchanges or crypto-to-cash desks. By the time investigators trace the first hop, the funds have already passed through a dozen wallets across multiple chains.
India’s government has taken note. The “PRAHAAR” counter-terrorism strategy released in February 2026 specifically flagged the growing use of crypto wallets by criminal and terrorist networks. A dedicated darknet and cryptocurrency task force has been set up under the Multi-Agency Centre. And the Union Budget 2025-2026 allocated ₹782 crore for cybersecurity projects. But for most victims, the enforcement infrastructure is still catching up.
How they get caught — and what mistakes they make
Despite all of crypto’s perceived anonymity, scammers do get caught. And in almost every recent Indian case, the pattern of mistakes is remarkably similar.
The biggest one is the fiat on-ramp and off-ramp. No matter how many wallets a scammer routes funds through, the stolen money almost always starts as rupees in a victim’s bank account and ends up as rupees in the scammer’s. That means bank KYC records, transaction histories, and UPI logs create a paper trail that investigators can follow backward.
In the Ahmedabad ₹100 crore case, Dev was tracked through electronic surveillance and coordination between Crime Branch teams in two cities. In the Odisha-Gujarat case, police recovered mobile phones, bank passbooks, debit cards, and WhatsApp chat records that linked the accused to the fraud.
Mule accounts are another weak point. Scammers use bank accounts belonging to third parties — sometimes rented, sometimes stolen — to receive and move funds. But these mule accounts are registered to real people with real Aadhaar numbers and real phone numbers. Once investigators freeze a mule account and pull its KYC records, the chain begins to unravel.
In the ₹1.65 crore Ahmedabad cross-border case, the arrest of a single account renter gave investigators the thread they needed to map out the entire international network.
Communication metadata is the third vulnerability. Scammers rely heavily on WhatsApp, Telegram, and encrypted messaging apps to coordinate operations and communicate with victims. But call detail records, IP addresses, and device-level data can still be extracted through lawful interception orders.
In the multi-state ₹2.27 crore digital arrest scam busted in Ahmedabad just last month, police traced the defrauded money through bank accounts spanning Bihar, Haryana, and West Bengal using financial trail mapping and technical analysis before conducting coordinated operations across states.
And then there is the most human mistake of all: not knowing when to stop. Dev, the ₹100 crore accused, continued living in Ahmedabad’s Naroda area despite being wanted by Mumbai Police. Harshik Mukeshbhai Patel, a 26-year-old Ahmedabad man arrested in a separate ₹1.5 crore crypto scam in 2025, was picked up from Chandkheda in Gandhinagar district — not exactly a remote hiding spot.
Scammers who stay in familiar cities, maintain social media presence, and continue using known phone numbers make themselves findable. Eventually, a lookout circular or a tip-off does the rest.
The bigger picture: Gujarat and India’s crypto fraud epidemic
This latest Ahmedabad arrest comes at a time when crypto-linked fraud is hitting India from every direction.
Over 24 lakh cybercrime complaints were filed on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal in 2025, with reported losses totalling ₹22,495 crore. The recovery rate is dismal — of the ₹36,448 crore in cumulative losses reported since the portal’s inception, only ₹60.52 crore has actually been returned to victims.
Gujarat has its own history with large-scale crypto fraud. The biggest of them all remains the BitConnect scam — a multinational Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Gujarat-native Satish Kumbhani through his US-based firm.
The Enforcement Directorate seized cryptocurrency worth ₹1,646 crore from digital devices found at premises in Gujarat linked to Kumbhani in February 2025, marking the largest single-day crypto seizure by any Indian investigating agency. In January 2026, the ED arrested two more individuals — Nikunj Pravinbhai Bhatt and Sanjay Kotadia — in connection with the BitConnect case after tracing extorted Bitcoins through multiple third-party crypto accounts, with funds eventually converted into Ethereum and USDT.
And just last month, the CBI made its first arrest in the ₹20,000 crore GainBitcoin scam — intercepting Darwin Labs Co-Founder Ayush Varshney at Mumbai airport as he attempted to board a flight to Sri Lanka. That investigation has already led to the seizure of crypto worth ₹23 crore and continues to expand across multiple states.
For Ahmedabad specifically, the trajectory is clear. The city’s role in India’s crypto scam ecosystem is not as a passive host but as an active hub — a place where accused individuals set up shop, open investment offices, rent out bank accounts, and operate multi-state fraud networks while hiding in plain sight.
The ₹1.5 crore case that just led to six arrests may seem modest compared to the ₹100 crore and ₹1,646 crore cases that have come before it. But it is cases like these — mid-size, multi-state, targeting ordinary people through social media and messaging apps — that represent the bulk of India’s crypto fraud problem. They are the ones that affect the most victims, and the ones that are hardest to prevent.
Police have urged citizens to avoid investment offers that promise guaranteed returns, to verify any platform with SEBI before depositing money, and to report fraud immediately through the national helpline 1930 or the nearest cybercrime police station.
Also Read: India’s Pune Can’t Catch a Break: ₹3.8 Cr Lost in 7 Days to Crypto Scams
