The Pune city Police have traced 237 bitcoins taken by two cyber specialists who were arrested for committing a multicrore cryptocurrency seizure fraud while assisting the cops in two cases in 2018.
Last month on March 12, the Pune City police’s cybercrime cell detained two specialists — Pankaj Ghode (38) and Ravindranath Patil (45) and an ex-IPS officer of Jammu and Kashmir cadre, following an exhaustive probe that began in April 2021.
In 2018, Ghode and Patil aided a Pune police Special Investigations squad in uncovering two multimillion-dollar bitcoin ponzi schemes. The duo transferred the cryptocurrencies, recovered from the Gainbitcoin scam, and then manipulated the screenshots of those transactions and gave them to the police as proof. However, the technical investigation revealed that there were some bitcoins in the said wallet and Ghode did not give information regarding them to the investigating officer.
Two FIRs were lodged at Dattawadi and Nigdi police stations against the duo for probing the fraud, under sections 406, 409, 420, 120 b, 109, 201 of the IPC and sections of the Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors (MPID) Act.
From the 17 persons arrested in the 2018 case, the Pune Police, had, with the assistance of Ghode and Patil, seized 241.46 Bitcoins, 452 Bitcoin cash units, and 94 Ethereum units. As of Thursday, 14:00 IST, Bitcoin was trading at 35,76,630, according to CoinMarketCap data, which means the recovered bitcoins are worth 84,88,88,259.00 as per recent exchange rates.
“We have been able to trace as many 237 bitcoins to the wallets linked to Patil, equivalent to worth over Rs 84 crore. Prima facie, this chunk of cryptocurrency is from what was seized from the accused in the 2018 cases. The probe suggests that Patil was also involved in crypto trading. To date, we have seized Rs 6 crore worth of cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, Ripple, and four others. We are also probing a discrepancy of 900 bitcoins — equivalent to over Rs 320 crore today — in the reports submitted by Ghode at the time of the 2018 investigation,” an official who is part of the present investigation team stated.