New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate has identified a Dubai-based venture capitalist, who owns an Abu Dhabi T10 cricket league franchise, as the mastermind of an investment fraud amounting to Rs 500-600 crore in India, ThePrint has learnt.
Lavish Choudhary, a resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, was behind the investment fraud first busted by Himachal Pradesh Police in 2023, ED officials said, requesting anonymity.
Explaining the modus operandi, an ED official highlighted that Choudhary, who also goes by the name ‘Navab’, floated a multi-level marketing scheme called “Botbro”, under which he claimed to carry out forex trading through artificial intelligence (AI) robots.
As part of its probe under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the ED raided premises linked to shell companies across Delhi, Noida, Rohtak in Haryana and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh, whose accounts were used for the deposition of funds by investors on the promise of approximately 5 percent returns per month on their invested amount.
The agency has so far frozen funds amounting to Rs 170 crore lying in nearly 30 bank accounts linked to shell companies, such as NPay Box Private Limited, Capter Money Solutions Private Limited and Tiger Digital Services Private Limited, which were used as “surrogate” bank accounts, sources in the ED told ThePrint.
ED’s probe came after Mandi Police in Himachal Pradesh busted an investment scheme run by Zirakpur-based firm QFX Trade in November 2023. The case was registered at Bahl police station in the district based on an investor’s complaint. It was later declared as a fraud of around Rs 210 crore, affecting nearly 100 people from the district alone.
According to the investigation by Himachal Pradesh Police and ED, promoters of this pyramid scheme lured investors by promising 5 percent monthly returns on their investments. People subscribing to the plan were promised commission on referrals and onboarding more customers onto the platform.
The scheme was operational in Mandi, Dharamshala and Una districts in Himachal Pradesh, Mohali, Zirakpur and Ludhiana in Punjab, Haryana’s Panipat, Chandigarh, and some districts of Gujarat.
Three directors of the firm—Rajendar Sood, Vineet Kumar and Santosh Sharma—are all absconding. On the other hand, Himachal Pradesh Police arrested Sood’s wife, Neetu Devi, in November 2023 on grounds of being directors of shell companies that benefitted from the fraud.
Himachal Pradesh Police’s Central Range DIG Soumya Sambasivan, who led the SIT that investigated the case and arrested Neetu Devi, said the lid was blown off after a Mandi-based retail businessman approached police with a complaint of investment fraud.
“People of Mandi struggled to bring more people on board, neither were they readily accepting the offers for lavish parties overseas, instead they sought money which was never returned to them. This led to one businessman complaining to police,” DIG Sambasivan, who was Mandi SP at the time of investigation, told ThePrint. “In our probe, we found that a fraud of this level was beyond the scope of a few agents. A special investigation team that included Additional SP Amit Yadav was formed and persons linked to the company were arrested, leading to the nexus coming to light.”
What ED found in its probe
Having taken cognisance of the Himachal Pradesh Police’s FIR, the ED opened an Enforcement Complaint Information Report last year, and started scanning the flow of funds from the accounts where depositors first transferred their money in the name of investment to the final destination of funds.
After months of analysis, sources in the agency said, some 30 bank accounts were earmarked where funds were pooled in from those initially used for fund transfer.
Officials from the federal probe agency Wednesday initially searched premises linked to the three firms mentioned above, which they alleged existed only on paper and had no actual business transactions.
They widened their scope of investigation, covering agents over a two-day-long raid that ended Wednesday after revelation and recovery of materials in the first round of searches Tuesday, sources in the ED told ThePrint.
The three directors of the firm had gone absconding even before Himachal Pradesh Police registered the case in November 2023. Choudhary fled India after registration of the case, sources in the ED said.
However, he has been calling agents and accomplices involved with him in the scheme to attend lavish parties in Dubai, where he establishes the business’s potential to lure more investors.
In the aftermath of the FIR, ED officials said, Choudhary renamed the platform to Yorker FX (YFX), although with the same process of luring investors on the pretext of exorbitant returns.
“During search operations, huge movable properties in the form of more than 30 bank account balances of these shell companies to the tune of Rs 170 crore have been frozen as directors of the company could not explain the source of funds,” an ED official said, requesting anonymity.
“Searches were also conducted on some of the agents of QFX/YFX and exposed the illegal local hawala network. Cash amounts of more than Rs 90 lakh were seized from one of the premises of one of the agents. Various incriminating documents and digital devices have been recovered and seized during the search operation. Further investigation is underway.”
ED officials highlighted that Choudhary took his investors and agents to lavish events in India, Thailand and Dubai, and offered SUVs to lure them further into his multi-level marketing scheme.
Another official said that money was taken from investors in cash or benami accounts, such as the ones frozen by the agency during Tuesday and Wednesday’s searches, but a majority of them were allegedly offered a return on their investment in the form of a yet-to-be launched cryptocurrency named TLC 2.0 coin.
Investigators said that TLC 2.0 Coin has been tipped to be launched in March 2027, meaning a return on investment has been locked till that period and can’t be fully realised till that time.
ThePrint has reached out to Choudhary for a comment via email. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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