Athira Sethu
Kochi, 24 January 2025
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has started investigating payment gateways Paytm, Razorpay, PayU, Easebuzz, and others after freezing around Rs 500 crore belonging to a large cryptocurrency scam, HPZ Token, allegedly being operated by Chinese nationals from India.
The scam was orchestrated across India, where over Rs 2,200 crores were amassed from people in 20 states. Investors were promised returns from cryptocurrency mining, including Bitcoin, through the HPZ Token mobile app. The criminals then moved the money out of the country, and some of the funds were frozen in those payment gateways before being transferred to the beneficiaries.
It came to light when large payments were being processed. The money stayed with the payment gateways for a couple of days, during which the ED managed to freeze Rs 500 crore. A court in Nagaland recently declared Bhupesh Arora, a Delhi resident, a fugitive after he failed to appear before the ED. The ED has filed charges against 298 people involved in the scam.
The ED is tracing the money trail and verifying if the payment gateways have flagged any suspicious transactions. Financial institutions are supposed to report suspicious transactions to the RBI, which then forwards them to the FIU for further investigation.
Out of the frozen amount, PayU had the largest sum of Rs 130 crore followed by Easebuzz with Rs 33.4 crore, Razorpay with Rs 18 crore, CashFree with Rs 10.6 crore, and Paytm with Rs 2.8 crore. Other gateways involved were WunderBaked, AgreePay, and SpeedPay.
More than 50 companies in Delhi had 84 bank accounts, and other firms were registered in Karnataka, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal.
