The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has provisionally attached assets worth 42.8 crore that belong to Indian nationals Chirag Tomar, who is already serving a 60-month term in US jails over a hacking job of a 20 million USD crypto scam. The properties belonging to Tomar and linked to the capital family are in Delhi, and the probe, which began in May, has involved seizure of the assets, the agency said on Tuesday.
The ED investigation commenced based on the information received by it that Tomar had been arrested in the US on fraud charges of defrauding hundreds of victims by operating dodgy crypto exchange websites. The scam consisted of spoofing legitimate services, such as Coinbase, with the use of search engine optimisation in order to rank the fake websites at position one on search engines. These fake websites would resemble the original ones in looks, with the exception of a change of contacts.
When they received wrong results for the login, they ended up on the fraudulent sites. They were advised to call a helpline number on the site, and they were redirected to a call centre, which was claimed to be run by Tomar. After the hackers managed to obtain login information, they immediately moved the holdings increase in cryptocurrency into the wallets that they controlled. The stolen NFT assets were then monetised through peer-to-peer (P2P) markets and sold in Indian rupees. The dollars were later diverted to bank accounts in Tomar and his family, where they were later used to purchase immovable assets and other luxury properties.
Tomar was sentenced by a US district judge in North Carolina in October 2024 to the amount of his spending on luxury sports cars such as Lamborghinis and Porsches, expensive watches, and expensive travels, including to Dubai and Thailand. Tomar was arrested at Atlanta airport in December 2023, before he pleaded guilty in May 2024. The ED has already tracked cryptocurrency worth nearly 600 crores at the Indian exchanges and also made searches at Delhi and Mumbai on 20th February as part of the investigation.
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