Hearing Date Announced for 4 Charged With Being Part Of A Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme

By Rishma Banerjee

Indian police recently filed charges against Amit Bhardwaj the primary mastermind who was arrested earlier, and his three partners, Vivek Bharadwaj, Hemant Bhope and Pankaj Adlakha who were allegedly a part of the GainBitcoin Ponzi scheme. India’s biggest bitcoin scam involved a fraudulent cloud-based platform for mining and trading BTC. The charge sheet that was filed contains reports from 15 complainants and 27 witnesses and is 1,800 pages long.

Other than Amit Bhardwaj who was the brainbox behind the entire scheme, his brother  Vivek Bharadwaj, the marketing and promoter manager of GainBitcoin was involved as the chief plotter. Vivek had been known to be a regular at events and seminars organized by the firm. Other than these two, Hemant Bhope, the organizing secretary of the company who had been convincing investors about the firm’s security and Pankaj Adlakha, promoter of the firm has also been named in the charge sheet.

As per a TOI report, the Gainbitcoin scheme had been founded by the Bharadwaj brother, back in 2013. They had also been hosting summits and throwing lavish parties in Dubai and Macau to lure in the investors as a result of which they had managed to gather 2000 crores (equivalent to $300 million). The incident came to light when a complaint was lodged by a former army personnel. The police, acting on these complaints then booked Amit Bhardwaj, Sanchit a Delhi resident and Rajesh Kumar aka Raju from Delhi who apparently had direct links with the Ponzi scheme.  The complainant later claimed that he had met Amit, through a sector 49 resident, in Dubai in 2016 who then has lured him into investing by offering high returns on investing in Bitcoins. He then added thair on hearing about their arrest, when he checked his online account, his portfolio did not have a single bitcoin, and it was then that he lodged a fir with the cyber cell.

However, they later arrested the Bharadwaj brothers, Bhope and Adlakha from the International Gandhi Airport, in 2017 and have since then been in Pune jail. Their case will be heard on the 4th of December, this year, and a “challan,” a document which will help the court in ascertaining their final charges, while also be presented then. The challan pegs the alleged fraud at six crore rupees, while the complainants have claimed that it exceeded ten crore rupees (around 1.4 million USD). The HC petition, however, alleges that the fraud was “worth 40,000 crore rupees (5.6 billion USD).