Key Highlights
- Chandigarh Cyber Crime Police arrested a 29-year-old man from Rajasthan in a ₹37.23 lakh crypto fraud case targeting a Sector 44 resident.
- Victim Narender Ahlawat was duped by a fake “TRD-NFT” scheme promising 2% daily returns via AI-driven crypto trading.
- With help from Binance, investigators traced the funds to Jitendra Singh, who allegedly rented his wallet to a Haryana-based scam operator.
India’s crypto fraud crackdown has rolled over into yet another case, this time out of Chandigarh, where the Cyber Crime Police Station has arrested a Rajasthan native whose Binance wallet was allegedly used to collect money siphoned off from a city resident through a fake AI trading pitch.
According to a report by The Indian Express, the accused has been identified as Jitendra Singh, 29, who was picked up on April 8 along with his mobile phones.
How the scam unfolded in India
The complainant in the case is Narender Ahlawat, a resident of Sector 44, Chandigarh, who thought he had stumbled onto a golden opportunity but ended up losing ₹37.23 lakh ($40,704), to a crypto trading racket.
As per the report, Ahlawat was first contacted last year by fraudsters claiming to be from a firm named “TRD-NFT.” They pitched him on earning a 2% daily profit using artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency trading, a return structure that has become a familiar red flag across India’s crypto fraud landscape.
To make the pitch appear legitimate, the operators sent Ahlawat fake certificates and doctored transaction screenshots designed to look like live trading activity. Convinced by the optics, he transferred ₹37.23 lakh to a digital wallet provided by the group. The illusion collapsed the moment he tried to withdraw his money along with the accumulated profit; the representatives stopped responding to his messages and went completely dark.
The Binance trail and the arrest
The case eventually landed with the Cyber Crime Police Station in Chandigarh, which took it up and began coordinating directly with Binance to track the stolen money. The investigation revealed that the beneficiary of the fraudulent wallet was Jitendra Singh, a 29-year-old from Rajasthan. Police arrested him on April 8 and seized his mobile phones.
During interrogation, Singh reportedly admitted that he had joined the scheme after meeting a person from Haryana who specialises in running such scams. His role, per investigators, was to allow his own Binance wallet to be used as the collection point for victims’ money, essentially the same mule-infrastructure pattern Indian law enforcement has been unpacking across the country. The police probe is ongoing to identify the other members of the racket.
Recent India crypto fraud cases
The Chandigarh arrest lands on top of a stack of crypto-linked busts unfolding across Indian cities over just the past few weeks. On April 10, Delhi Police’s Crime Branch arrested two accused in a ₹74 lakh online investment fraud where rupees were layered through mule accounts before being flipped into crypto for foreign handlers.
Pune has been a particularly active front. In late March, the city reported twin ₹69 lakh scams on the same day, one involving a techie lured into a fake crypto trading app that displayed over ₹80 lakh in fake profits before blocking withdrawals, and another a 62-year-old woman coerced through a TRAI-linked “digital arrest” scam.
Earlier that month, Ahmedabad Police busted a ₹1.5 crore multi-state crypto scam and arrested six accused running a fake digital asset investment platform.
In March, Mangaluru Cyber Crime Police broke up a ₹85 crore USDT laundering pipeline built on 70-plus mule bank accounts that funnelled Indian cybercrime proceeds to operators based in China. The CBI also moved on a ₹1.86 crore digital arrest case alongside a separate ₹350 crore crypto Ponzi scheme with coordinated searches across seven states and union territories.
Even India’s top crypto exchange has not been spared, with CoinDCX co-founders arrested by Thane Police in March over a brand impersonation fraud, prompting the exchange to announce a ₹100 crore Digital Suraksha Network.
Global context: Crypto fraud goes cross-border
The Chandigarh case also lands against the backdrop of a globally escalating crypto investment fraud crisis. Just this past week, the UK’s National Crime Agency wrapped Operation Atlantic, freezing $12 million in crypto scam funds across a week-long cross-border operation run jointly with the US Secret Service, Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ontario Securities Commission. Investigators identified over 20,000 victims worldwide, many tied to “approval phishing” where users are tricked into authorising wallet access under the guise of legitimate investment opportunities.
Meanwhile, China arrested Li Xiong, former chairman of the Cambodia-based Huione Group, for allegedly running a $4 billion global money laundering network with crypto as a core laundering rail, a case linked to the Prince Group empire from which US authorities seized nearly $15 billion in Bitcoin. The FBI, in its latest report, pegged 2025 US crypto fraud losses at a record $11.36 billion, with investment fraud dominating the complaints.
On the policy side in India, the government’s PRAHAAR counter-terrorism strategy released in February 2026 specifically flagged the growing misuse of crypto wallets by criminal networks, and from April 1, 2026, updated Income Tax provisions now allow authorities to access crypto wallets, emails, and social media during authorised searches.
Whether any of that translates into actual recoveries for victims like Ahlawat remains an open question, given that only ₹60.52 crore of the ₹36,448 crore in cumulative cybercrime losses reported on the national portal has ever been returned to complainants.
For now, the Chandigarh arrest chips away at one more rung of the mule layer holding India’s crypto fraud machinery together, even as the Haryana-based operator who allegedly recruited Jitendra Singh remains at large.
Also Read: India’s Pune Can’t Catch a Break: ₹3.8 Cr Lost in 7 Days to Crypto Scams
