India’s law enforcement agencies have seized $190 million in crypto assets linked to the notorious BitConnect Ponzi scheme.
During the raids, carried out between February 11 and 15, 2025, $15,582 in cash, a luxury SUV, and multiple electronic devices were also seized.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) said it had started its investigation under the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act (PMLA) based on FIRs registered by the CID crime Police station in Surat.
The scheme collapsed just two years after collecting over $2.4 billion from ‘investors’ before the US regulators issued cease-and-desist orders.
BitConnect Fraud Conviction
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is the division responsible for investigating financial fraud and economic crimes in India.
Their investigation showed that between November 2016 and January 2018, the founder of BitConnect created an international network of paid promoters to influence investors to deposit funds in cash and Bitcoin.
Investors were asked to purchase BitConnect Coins in a Ponzi scheme repackaged as high-yield investments with over 40% monthly returns.
Moreover, the unauthorized company was supposed to produce these returns through a purported proprietary “volatility software trading bot.” They tricked people by displaying a doctored 1% daily profit on its website.
Unfortunately, all their claims were fictitious, as the founder of BitConnect did not use the received funds for trading. Instead, they continued to collect investors’ funds and transferred them into digital wallet addresses.
During their investigation, the ED had to look through a complex web of transactions carried out in dozens of crypto wallets to pinpoint the origin and controllers of those wallets.
These transactions were carried out on the dark web to make them untraceable. However, the ED could catch a whiff of their trace by persistently scanning through multiple web wallets.
Foreign nationals also invested in this Ponzi Scheme, and the founder is still being investigated in the US.
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