Indian investigators who are probing a gaming app scam told a special court that the kingpin, 25-year-old Aamir Khan, carried out transactions worth 44,000 bitcoin (BTC), which amounts to over $1 billion at the current market price, The Times of India reported. Earlier, the investigators of the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) had discovered about 120 BTC and huge amounts of cash in bank accounts in a series of raids conducted on the premises liked to the accused.
In previous press releases, the ED explained that the accused had set up a gaming platform where he would lure the users to deposit their funds by promising attractive returns. His gaming app called E-Nuggets operated mostly during the period of the Covid shutdown. In February 2022, a national-level bank complained to the police in Kolkata against E-Nuggets and its promoter Aamir Khan, stating it suspect that these entities were involved in money laundering. But the police reportedly did not take any action.
Somehow, the matter reached the Union Finance Ministry and it instructed the ED to carry out an investigation. The ED carried out the first round of raids on September 10 and arrested Aamir Khan on September 25.
According to the ED, Aamir Khan would pay the investors for the initial few deposits till they start depositing bigger amounts. At that stage, he would prevent withdrawals on one pretext or the other. After some time, he suddenly pulled down the E-Nuggets platform and deleted his profile and the app’s address from the servers. All the while, he would invest the funds into BTC, using Binance and WazirX crypto exchanges. Khan and his associates used more than 300 bank accounts to divert the funds, the ED said to the court.
