India’s crypto fraud crackdown has landed in Surat, where the City Cyber Crime Cell on Thursday arrested a 29-year-old software engineer for his alleged role in an online investment scam that cheated a local complainant of more than ₹72.73 lakh through the promise of outsized cryptocurrency trading returns.
According to the report by India Tribune, citing official police sources in Surat, the investigation uncovered a suspected mule account that investigators later linked to eight cyber fraud complaints spanning multiple states.
A Telegram Message, a Fake Platform, and ₹72.73 Lakh Gone
According to the police, the accused has been identified as Divyesh Patel, a B.Tech graduate in Electrical Engineering employed at a software company in the city. He currently lives at Shiv Residency near Tirupati Circle in Surat’s New Althan area and hails from Akala village in the Lathi taluka of Amreli district.
Investigators said the fraud followed a script that has become depressingly familiar across India. The complainant was first contacted on Telegram by cyber fraudsters who shared a link to a fake trading website. Once an account was created on the platform, the victim was assured of substantial profits from cryptocurrency trading.
Convinced by the pitch, the victim transferred a total of ₹72,73,600 into multiple bank accounts supplied by the operators. The promised returns never arrived, and neither did the principal. The victim then reported the matter through the national cybercrime helpline, after which a case was registered at the Cyber Crime Police Station.
The FIR invokes Sections 318(4), 336(2), 338, 336(3), 340(2), 61(2), and 3(5) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, along with Section 66(D) of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008.
The Mule Account That Opened a ₹24.72 Crore Can of Worms
What began as a single-victim complaint quickly widened. Police found that ₹17 lakh of the complainant’s money had landed in an IDBI Bank account linked to Patel.
During interrogation, investigators learned that Patel had allegedly handed over the banking kit for that account to an absconding accused, to be used for cyber fraud, in exchange for a 2% commission on every transaction. Scrutiny of the account revealed that transactions worth ₹1,60,84,505 had already passed through it.
The bigger revelation came from the Samanvaya Portal, the inter-state coordination platform used by Indian law enforcement to cross-reference cybercrime complaints. Checks on the portal showed that the same bank account was tied to eight cyber fraud complaints registered across different states, involving alleged fraud worth a combined ₹24,72,31,464, or roughly ₹24.72 crore.
A team led by Police Inspector A.M. Mori traced Patel through technical analysis before taking him into custody. The hunt for the absconding accused who allegedly controlled the account continues.
Police Advisory: Small Wins Are the Bait
Alongside the arrest, the Surat Cyber Crime Cell issued a public advisory urging citizens not to trust unsolicited investment offers tied to forex, share trading or cryptocurrency without independent verification.
The police asked people to exit and block unknown WhatsApp and Telegram groups, resist the temptation to scale up investments after receiving small initial payouts, avoid transferring money to strangers met on social media or matrimonial platforms, and report suspected fraud immediately on the cybercrime helpline.
The warning about small initial returns is pointed. In case after case, fraud syndicates allow early withdrawals of modest profits to build trust before locking accounts once larger sums are deposited.
Part of a Widening Pattern Across India
The Surat arrest is the latest entry in a rapidly growing ledger of crypto-linked fraud enforcement across the country. On the very same day, India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) carried out early morning raids across West Bengal in a money laundering probe covering crypto investment fraud, chit fund operations and bogus stock market schemes with suspected Dubai-linked fund flows.
Gujarat itself has been a hotspot. Just last month, the state’s Cyber Crime Police arrested a 26-year-old engineer from Bihar in the WinProFX forex and crypto scam, an operation investigators believe may have affected users in nearly 100 countries. In June, the ED also moved against an alleged ₹500 crore crypto MLM scheme built around Korvio Coin that reportedly affected more than 248,000 investors.
The numbers behind the trend are stark. Government data presented in Parliament showed reported crypto scam cases surging from just over 1,300 in the previous fiscal year to more than 11,700 in the first eight months of the current one, a jump of over 700%. With mule accounts like the one uncovered in Surat serving as the plumbing for these operations, expect enforcement agencies to keep following the money.
Also Read: India’s ED Files Crypto Laundering Case Against Alleged Hacker Sriki
