Odisha police's Economic Offence Wing announced on Monday that it had uncovered a cryptocurrency scam worth over Rs. 1,000 crores with the arrests of Gurtej Singh Sidhu, India head of STA Crypto Token, from Rajasthan, and his associate arrests.
Sidhu, a resident of Faridkot, Punjab was detained on August 4 in Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan, and was presented before a local court, which issued a seven-day transit remand to transport him to Odisha. On Monday, he was produced before the Cuttack-based Odisha Protection of Interests of Depositors Court.
“We were chasing the accused for the past few days as he was frequently changing his location in places like Goa, Lonavala, Mumbai, Delhi, Faridkot, Bhatinda, Hanumangadh, and Sri Ganganagar. A team of the Economic Offence Wing was tracking his movements,” said J N Pankaj, inspector-general of the wing, which also arrested Nirod Das of Bhadrak.
The police wing started an investigation after receiving information about a cryptocurrency-based Ponzi fraud being run in Odisha, particularly in the districts of Bhadrak, Balasore, Bhubaneswar, Mayurbhanj, Jajpur, Kendrapara, and Keonjhar,
The scammers were discovered to have been working in these districts through certain upline members, according to a police statement. “They have been using various propaganda tools to persuade people to join the scheme and earn huge money in a very short time,” it said.
Even though more than 2 lakh people, primarily from the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Assam, invested in the program after seeing huge profits, police sources figure that there are more than 10,000 investors in Odisha.
According to the police, STA was illegally operating a multi-level marketing business under the guise of a cryptocurrency token and was not licensed to receive deposits by the RBI or any other authorities.
According to Pankaj, STA hid the crypto-ponzi scam by using well-known phrases like solar technology and green energy. Although the website is hosted in Iceland, these activities are limited to India only.
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