One of the co-founders of BitConnect, the biggest cryptocurrency scam, is now wanted by the Indian state police, which adds another twist to the story.
The Indian Express reported on Wednesday that authorities in India had started a new investigation into Satish Kumbhani, an Indian citizen thought to be the mastermind behind the cryptocurrency Ponzi scam BitConnect.
A lawyer in Pune lost 220 bitcoin to BitConnect scammers
After a lawyer in Pune reported losing roughly 220 Bitcoin (BTC), or about $5.2 million, to BitConnect, the Pune police, which is part of the Indian state Maharashtra Police, began investigating Kumbhani. The complaint says that the person invested 54 BTC at first and then put the 166 BTC that was left over into several sites.
The claimant said that he dealt with Kumbhani and the other suspects between 2016 and June of 2021 and named six more people he believed to be complicit in the scheme. According to a source, police have not made any arrests.
BitConnect pulled $2.4 billion from crypto users
According to reports, BitConnect was one of the largest crypto scams, with the Ponzi scheme’s organizers fraudulently amassing almost $2.4 billion from naive investors. BitConnect was a platform and digital currency launched in February 2016 but shut down in January 2018 after its founders disappeared with investor funds.
The Department of Justice prosecuted Satish Kumbhani in February 2022 for organizing this scheme. His last known location was in India, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) couldn’t find him.
This isn’t the first time crypto scam founders have gone AWOL. The creators of the defunct 2019 $4 billion global Ponzi scam OneCoin are also wanted by global authorities. OneCoin’s Bulgarian-German founder, Ruja Ignatova, was included in the FBI’s
“Ten Most Wanted” list in June 2022. Still, they hadn’t made any headway in their search for Ignatova since 2017, when the so-called “Cryptoqueen” was last spotted.
Despite the best efforts of the state police, the crypto criminal in the Kumbhani case has not been caught.
