For most Indians, the number ₹10,71,55,66,034 is difficult to visualise. For the Gujarat Police Cyber Centre of Excellence, it now has a single name attached to it: Rafiqool Alam.
The 25-year-old resident of Barpeta district in Assam was arrested on Monday, and investigators are describing him as one of the most prolific money handlers ever traced in an Indian digital arrest investigation. According to the Gujarat Police, Alam’s fingerprints sit on 1,090 cybercrime cases across the country, and the pipeline he allegedly ran connected small-town Indian mule accounts to a Chinese criminal syndicate that never touched Indian soil.
The arrest, first reported by IANS, followed a three-day undercover reconnaissance in Barpeta. Officers moved in disguise, mapped the target, then raided his home and seized a stack of technical devices. What those devices contained is the more revealing part of the story.
The scam that unravelled the network
The case did not begin with Alam. It began with an elderly man staring at a video call.
A senior citizen had been placed under what investigators call a “live” digital arrest, held on camera by fraudsters who produced forged letters bearing the letterheads of the Maharashtra Police and the Supreme Court of India. While counselling the victim, cyber officers realised the operation was industrial in scale. A quick technical sweep of the bank accounts linked to the case surfaced around ten other victims across India who were being held in identical digital arrests at that very moment.
“Teams visited their homes and prevented them from transferring money to the fraudsters,” police said. It was that parallel rescue effort, cross-referenced with the money trail, that led investigators up the chain to the handler in Assam.
A launderer with 23 wallets on his phone
What Alam allegedly did with the money is where the case shifts from a routine cybercrime bust into a case study on how India’s cash is now being moved offshore.
Once funds hit Indian bank accounts from digital arrest victims, the accused would layer them through multiple accounts, break them into smaller amounts, then convert the residue into cryptocurrency. The crypto was then transferred to members of a Chinese criminal network.
To stay ahead of the Financial Intelligence Unit and standard bank triggers, he allegedly relied on split transfers. In one instance, police say, a single transaction was fragmented across 1,754 Indian bank accounts within an hour. That is a rate of nearly 30 accounts per minute, and the sort of operational speed that only a pre-built mule account network can deliver.
His phone told the rest of the story. Investigators say they recovered 23 cryptocurrency wallets from the handset, with roughly ₹16 crore in traceable transactions flowing through them. Two other channels stood out: the Chip Seller app, which he allegedly used for the informal buying and selling of crypto, and online gaming accounts, which were repurposed as a financial rail rather than a leisure platform.
The most telling detail may be the communication layer. Police allege that Alam exchanged wallet details, scanners, user IDs, passwords, and even the modus operandi of specific crimes with his Chinese counterparts over WhatsApp and Telegram. This is not the picture of a low-level mule. It is the picture of an embedded operator inside a foreign syndicate.
Rescues in Ahmedabad, Surat and Jamnagar
The same investigation ended up saving several people from finishing the transfers they had been coerced into.
In Ahmedabad, a senior citizen was allegedly threatened by callers posing as police officers who claimed he was about to be booked in a child pornography case. They demanded ₹20 lakh. Officers reached his home at night, sat him down, and stopped the transfer.
In Surat, another elderly man was told he would be implicated in cases involving the Enforcement Directorate and terrorism. The fraudsters initially wanted ₹60 lakh. He agreed to ₹40 lakh, tried to sell his flat, failed, then sold his shop for ₹20 lakh and kept the cash ready to hand over. That is when the Cyber Centre stepped in.
In Jamnagar, the play was investment fraud rather than intimidation. Callers claiming to be brokers for a “Morgan Max Company” dangled 50 to 60 per cent returns. The victim had already sent ₹9.50 lakh and was about to send another ₹10 lakh when officers pulled him back.
Five more interventions followed, in Raipur, Sundargarh, Mumbai, and two in Bhubaneswar. Three formal cases have been registered at the Cyber Crime Police Station in connection with the investigation.
A pattern the crypto world knows well
Alam’s arrest is not a one-off. It is another entry in what has become one of the most consistent stories in Indian cybercrime over the past 18 months: rupees stolen through fear-based scams, converted into crypto, and pushed out of the country toward China and Hong Kong.
In March, Pune Cyber Police arrested two men for a ₹10.74 crore digital arrest scam targeting an 82-year-old pensioner, with the trail again running through mule accounts into overseas exchanges, as reported by The Crypto Times. Weeks earlier, Madhya Pradesh’s Panna Police uncovered a ₹100 crore pipeline that used 40 bank accounts and shell companies to convert stolen rupees into crypto bound for Chinese wallets.
The macro numbers make the trend harder to dismiss. The Ministry of Home Affairs has told the Supreme Court that digital arrest scams alone have cost Indians around ₹3,000 crore. The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal logged over 24 lakh complaints in 2025, with reported fraud losses of ₹22,495 crore.
In February 2026, the Centre’s PRAHAAR counter-terrorism framework specifically flagged the growing use of crypto wallets by criminal networks, and a dedicated darknet and cryptocurrency task force has since been set up under the Multi-Agency Centre.
What the police want people to know
The Cyber Centre of Excellence has issued a fresh advisory alongside the arrest, urging citizens not to panic when callers claiming to represent the police, CBI, Enforcement Directorate, Supreme Court, or any other agency threaten arrest in cases involving money laundering, drugs, courier fraud, or similar offences and then demand money.
Victims are being urged to report suspected cyber fraud through the national cybercrime helpline 1930 or at cybercrime.gov.in. In many cases, officers say, a call placed within the first few hours is what makes the difference between a frozen account and a lost life’s savings.
For Alam, the case is only starting. For the Chinese operators on the other end of his Telegram chats, it is business as usual, at least until the next handler is found.
Also Read: What India Does With its Seized Crypto & Why the Enforcement Directorate is Now in Charge of It
