BHOPAL: A 70-year-old chartered accountant from Gwalior allegedly lost Rs 21.05 crore to cyber fraudsters in a cryptocurrency investment scam over six months.
In December 2025, Ashok Vijayvargiya was contacted on WhatsApp by a woman who introduced herself as investment consultant Divya Singh. She persuaded him to invest in cryptocurrency trading, including USDT and Bitcoin, and sent him a link to create an online trading account.
After registering, Vijayvargiya began receiving calls from others encouraging him to invest in USDT and Bitcoin. The fraudsters gained his trust by claiming to have earned huge profits through cryptocurrency trading. They also credited Rs 1.88 lakh to his bank account as profit, prompting him to invest larger sums in what was allegedly a fake trading platform.
When Vijayvargiya later tried to withdraw his investments, fraudsters posing as trading platform operators demanded Rs 10.84 crore as tax. After he contacted Divya, she allegedly convinced him to pay Rs 5.34 crore, promising to pay the remaining amount herself.
A few weeks later, when he again sought to withdraw the money, the fraudsters demanded 2 lakh USDT, worth more than Rs 1.92 crore, as risk margin money.
After discussing the matter with friends and clients, Vijayvargiya suspected he had been cheated and lodged a complaint with the Madhya Pradesh State Cyber Police's Gwalior zonal unit, which registered a case under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act, 2008.
According to Deputy Superintendent of Police Sanjeev Nayan, the fraudsters used multiple layers of mule accounts to rotate the money. In the first two layers alone, around 570 mule accounts were used, with nearly 40% of the accounts opened in banks in southern India.
“Promptly acting in the matter, we’ve succeeded in putting on hold Rs 2 crores invested by the CA, by getting multiple accounts freezed with the help of union home ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and further investigations are underway,” Nayan told TNIE on Tuesday.
