India’s Enforcement Directorate seized commercial properties worth Rs 10.63 crore in Dubai in February 2025, part of an investigation into the GainBitcoin Ponzi scheme that has now reached Rs 172 crore in total asset seizures. GainBitcoin promised investors 10% monthly returns in Bitcoin for 18 months. It was run by Amit Bhardwaj, who is dead, and his brother Ajay Bhardwaj, who isn’t. Thousands of investors lost money. Years later, the legal machinery is still moving slowly through the wreckage.
The CBI made its first arrest in the case in February 2025 — Darwin Labs co-founder Ayush Varshney, linked to 29,000 allegedly mined Bitcoins. Searches hit 60 locations across Delhi NCR, Pune, Chandigarh, Nanded, Kolhapur, and Bengaluru. Family members of the Bhardwaj brothers have had properties attached in Dubai. Three people have been arrested total. Two chargesheets have been filed, the first in 2019.
Running parallel is a Rs 600 crore case tied to Chirag Tomar, who built near-perfect fake copies of the Coinbase website to steal from crypto investors. He’s now in a US prison for defrauding people of over $20 million. ED raids in Delhi, Jaipur, and Mumbai found Rs 15 crore moved into accounts belonging to Tomar and his family, and seized Rs 2.18 crore in cash and assets.
And then there’s what happened in Bharatpur, which gets at why these cases are so hard to contain. A fake website — gqcw.cn — collected money from over 3 lakh investors across India with promises of crypto and forex returns that were never going to materialise. The Supreme Court eventually pulled cases from eight states into the CBI’s lap in December 2023. Local jurisdictions simply weren’t built for fraud that hops borders and parks money in Dubai.
What makes these cases hard to prosecute isn’t a mystery: crypto’s legal status in India is still murky, offshore banking is designed to complicate recovery, and by the time a case develops enough for a chargesheet, victims have often spent years with no recourse.
The warning signs aren’t subtle. Fixed monthly returns of 8–12% in crypto don’t exist — if someone is promising them, the money is coming from new investors, not returns. Platforms that won’t show you a blockchain address for your deposit are hiding where the money goes. Offshore operators targeting Indian investors from Singapore, Dubai, or the Caymans have specifically structured themselves to frustrate Indian courts. Investment schemes pushed through WhatsApp with countdown timers and “limited spots” are not investment platforms. And if you can’t withdraw your own money without hitting some new requirement — team minimums, upgrade fees, volume thresholds — that’s not a policy, that’s a signal the operator can’t pay.
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