Police in India have arrested 11 people related to a cryptocurrency scam which has so far seen $5.4 million stolen from around 2,000 investors. Seven of those people arrested were taken in Sunday in Maharashtra’s Nagpur.
The alleged ringleader is Nishid Wasnik, who was arrested in the city of Pune the previous day along with his wife Pragati and associates Gajanan Mungune and Sandesh Lanjewar. The quartet had been evading authorities for most of the last year. All were charged under IPC, Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors Act and Information Technology Act provisions by police in the region of Yashodhara Nagar.
According to an anonymous official cited in news reports Wasnik allegedly led an ostentatious lifestyle which he used to entice unsuspecting victims to invest in a firm he told them invested in Ether (ETH). Wasnik supposedly manipulated the platform’s website to suggest the investments were continuously rising in value. In reality Wasnik was allegedly siphoning money into his private accounts beginning in 2017 and running through 2021.
Wasnik’s plan was a brazen one. At one point he organized a cryptocurrency investment seminar in Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh. The most recent estimates have him stealing 40 crore rupees, which is the approximate equivalent of $5.4 million.
Indian citizens have shown keen interest in cryptocurrency investing, with a report from 2021 suggesting 100 million were playing in the space. The Indian government has been slower to catch the wave, though an official recently said they will introduce a central bank digital currency later this year.
With that interest comes the scams, which have targeted Indian investors with great frequency. According to a Chainalysis report from 2021 fake cryptocurrency websites attracted 9.6 million visits from inside India. The top five fraudulent sites visited by Indians, according to a Mint analysis of Chainalysis data, were Coinpayu.com, Adbtc.top, Hackertyper.net, Dualmine.com, and Coingain.app.
Many such sites are designed to collect the personal data of unwitting visitors such as names, emails, and phone numbers.