Eight years after an India Today undercover investigation first blew the lid off the Money Trade Coin (MTC) racket, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has finally moved in on the alleged kingpins of the scheme, conducting a series of searches across Mumbai and Thane and seizing around ₹1 crore in cash from properties linked to the accused.
The federal agency has pegged the total quantum of the fraud at roughly ₹113.10 crore, with proceedings initiated under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.
The searches, carried out on August 20, 2026 by the ED’s Mumbai Zonal Office, form the first substantive central-agency crackdown in a case that had been languishing for close to a decade in the Thane City Police docket.
According to an India Today report that first broke news of the ED’s intervention, the agency’s action followed sustained follow-up by the broadcaster after its original 2018 sting operation. A parallel follow-up story confirmed that the ED had raided properties belonging to the alleged crypto scam kingpins and recovered nearly ₹1 crore in unaccounted cash.
The 2018 Sting That Started It All
In mid-2018, a team of India Today reporters posed as high-net-worth investors and walked into the offices of the Flintstone Group in Thane, allegedly the corporate front for the MTC scheme. Pitching investments worth crores of rupees, the undercover journalists secured meetings with senior office bearers of the group, including one Digambar Jangle, described in local media reports as an alleged senior MTC official.
The reporters recorded office bearers pitching returns of 10 to 20 times (1,000% to 2,000%) the principal amount within just four to six months, along with sweeteners such as Caribbean citizenships, real estate assets in Dubai and Swiss bank accounts.
The subsequent exposé, coupled with a formal complaint filed by Delhi businessman Pravin Agarwal, triggered a raid by the Thane cyber crime unit on June 4, 2018. Officers registered an offence at Chitalsar police station and arrested Taha Hafiz Qazi, the group’s prime technical support staffer, from Mumbra. Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Abhishek Trimukhe, who oversaw the initial probe, confirmed at the time that the accused were “trading a cryptocurrency, called Money Trade Coin, and duped several people.”
Police estimates of the total loss ranged from ₹300 crore to about ₹500 crore, with roughly 25,000 investors said to have been hoodwinked. Investigators recovered 53 laptops, rubber stamps and fabricated documents from the group’s Orion Business Park office, along with photographs of alleged mastermind Amit Madanlal Lakhanpal posing with politicians and Bollywood celebrities. Around 70 employees were left stranded after the raid, with police probing whether any of them were complicit.
Anatomy of the MTC Ponzi
According to the ED’s statement, Lakhanpal and his co-accused floated Money Trade Coin (MTC) between August 2017 and April 2018, marketing it aggressively across India as an “unrecognized cryptocurrency” that would soon get official approval from New Delhi.
The token was formally launched on September 17, 2017 at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, with promoters claiming joint ownership through Bitcoin Global FZE (Free Zone Establishment) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Money Trade Coin Ltd in the United Kingdom (UK).
Lakhanpal, who styled himself “Dr. Amit Madanlal Lakhanpal” and authored a self-published book titled The World of Cryptocurrency, marketed the coin at an initial private sale price of about United States Dollar (USD) 3 before artificially inflating it to a claimed USD 6,000 per token, an appreciation of nearly 200,000%.
The catch, investigators later established, was that MTC was never listed on any legitimate cryptocurrency exchange, meaning close to 100% of retail buyers had no way to cash out.
The ED probe has now established that Lakhanpal held a series of investor seminars in Delhi, Pune and Nashik, during which he “presented himself as a Finance Ministry official” and assured attendees that MTC would soon receive statutory recognition from the Government of India. To create a veneer of institutional legitimacy, the group rolled out several affiliated schemes and exchange platforms, including Coin Deposit Ratio (CDR), MTC Banque, MTCX India and Cryptozaniya.
According to the agency, prices of the MTC token were manipulated through these very platforms to lure fresh investors and retain the existing ones, in classic Ponzi fashion. Once liquidity dried up, the accused abruptly stopped both trading and withdrawal facilities, leaving investors unable to recover either principal or the promised returns.
Named Accused and the Dubai Trail
The Thane City Police First Information Report (FIR), on which the ED case is predicated, names Amit Madanlal Lakhanpal as the alleged mastermind and absconding accused, alongside Taha Hafiz Qazi, Sachin Vasant Shelar (Lakhanpal’s chief accountant), Komal Bhimrao Shirsath and several others.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has now formally alleged that Lakhanpal and a number of his close associates left India after obtaining passports of Antigua and Barbuda and are currently residing in Dubai under assumed identities. This tracks with earlier statements by Delhi police officials, who had said Lakhanpal was “earlier holed up in Dubai” and may subsequently have shifted base to London. Assistant Inspector of Police (API) Digambar Jangale, previously accused of aiding the network from within the Maharashtra police, remains part of the wider case record.
Following the August 20 searches, the ED summoned Qazi, Shelar and Vikram Baghera for questioning over two consecutive days. Fearing imminent arrest, the trio moved the Special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Court seeking anticipatory bail. Their counsel had also sought interim protection pending the hearing of the anticipatory bail applications. Special Judge SV Sahare rejected that plea on Wednesday, observing that “huge amounts of public money is involved. Though the investigation taken up by the Directorate of Enforcement now, it is necessary to have thorough investigation, which needs co-operation from the applicants.”
The observation effectively strips the three accused of any judicial shield at the pre-arrest stage and clears the runway for the ED to summon, question and potentially arrest them under Section 19 of the PMLA.
Part of a Wider Crypto Crackdown
The MTC action is the latest in a rapid-fire sequence of enforcement moves against cryptocurrency-linked frauds by the ED over the past two months. In mid-July, the agency arrested three accused in the ₹500 crore Korvio Coin (KRO) Ponzi probe, a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scheme that allegedly defrauded over 2.48 lakh (248,000) investors and generated on-chain transactions exceeding USD 219 million.
Days later, it attached ₹55.5 crore in Mumbai properties in the ATC Coin case, where roughly ₹84 crore had been raised in the name of a self-created token. Around the same time, the agency dismantled a ₹303 crore transnational cyber fraud syndicate whose Tether (USDT), Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) trail ran through Dubai, and seized ₹3.35 crore in cryptocurrency assets during raids at 19 locations across Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Srinagar in a fake work-from-home investment scam. In late July, the ED opened a fresh probe into an alleged USD 35 million Over-The-Counter (OTC) crypto scam targeting foreign investors, and this week Navi Mumbai police arrested 13 people running a fake Apple helpdesk operation that routed proceeds to crypto wallets in the United States.
The MTC breakthrough also arrives against a backdrop of the ED taking formal custody of India’s seized cryptocurrency assets through empanelled exchanges such as CoinDCX, giving the agency operational capacity to actually move confiscated tokens rather than let them sit in inaccessible hardware wallets.
ED Director Rahul Navin has publicly named crypto-enabled fraud as a top enforcement priority, on par with terror financing and cyber-enabled crime, and the agency filed 812 charge sheets in the 2025-26 financial year, close to 100% higher than the previous period, with a conviction rate hovering around 94%.
Investor advocates have nonetheless flagged persistent bottlenecks, including the ₹1,740 crore Himachal Pradesh crypto scam probe where 69 out of 76 arrested accused, or roughly 91%, are already out on bail and trial has not begun against a single defendant.
Impact and What Comes Next
For MTC investors, many of whom have waited nearly eight years for meaningful movement in the case, Wednesday’s judicial order and Thursday’s ED searches mark the first credible signal that the beneficial owners of the alleged proceeds of crime, and the properties financed from them, may finally be traceable.
The ED is understood to be examining bank accounts, real estate holdings and cryptocurrency wallets linked to Lakhanpal’s network, and coordinating with counterparts in the UAE for potential extradition or property attachment abroad. With Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship-By-Investment (CBI) records now under scrutiny, the agency is expected to file a formal request for International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) assistance if it establishes that Lakhanpal continues to reside in Dubai under an assumed identity.
The broader takeaway, however, is one that the India Today exposé flagged as far back as 2018: a self-styled “Doctor” with a book, a Burj Al Arab launch and photographs alongside politicians can, absent effective statutory oversight of crypto issuance, run a Ponzi scheme worth over 100% of most retail investors’ life savings for the better part of a year before regulators catch up. The ED’s renewed activity suggests the catch-up has, at long last, begun.
Also Read: India Arrests 13 Over Fake Apple Support Crypto Scam
