THE Enforcement Directorate (ED) has seized its biggest-ever cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,646 crore as part of a “mega” money laundering investigation into a fraud investment scheme where numerous depositors were duped in the name of securities investment, official sources said. The Ahmedabad office of the federal probe agency has also seized Rs 13.50 lakh in cash, an SUV and a number of digital devices after it concluded a fresh round of searches on Saturday in the case related to“fraudulent” and unregistered offering and sale of securities in the form of investments through‘BitConnect lending program’.

 

The ED case, filed under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), stems from an FIR of the Surat Police crime branch which said the alleged fraud that took place between November 2016 - January 2018 (after demonetisation). The agency deployed a team of its tech-savvy experts who examined the “complex web” of transactions carried out in “numerous” crypto wallets to unmask the origin and controllers of these crypto wallets. It was found that many transactions were carried out through the“dark web” to make the transactions untraceable, the sources said.

 

The agency tracked“numerous” web wallets and gathered ground intelligence to zero-inon the wallets and the premises where the digital devices containing the said crypto currencies were available, they said. Sources told PTI that cryptocurrencies worth Rs 1,646 crore were seized and transferred into a special crypto wallet of the agency making it the biggestever seizure of virtual digital assets in a mega money laundering investigation which is still going on. The agency found during the probe that the founder of BitConnect, an unincorporated organisation, established “a worldwide network of promoters, and rewarded them for their promotional efforts by paying them commissions.”

 

 

 

 

 

THE CBI has conducted searches at 11 locations in Delhi and Haryana on alleged cyber criminals who were cheating people by impersonating as Government officers resulting in seizure of Rs 1.08 crore cash, officials said Saturday. The searches were conducted at nine locations in Delhi and two in Haryana’s Hisar on Friday in connection with a two-yearold case, they said. It was alleged that the accused were engaged in illegal activities by impersonating Government officials and committing crypto fraud, a CBI spokesperson said.