NEW DELHI, June 9: As lakhs of depositors suffer from the menace of ponzi schemes, a special PMLA court here has ordered freezing of Rs 1.63 crore in bank accounts of owners of chitfund companies running in Haryana and Punjab which have allegedly cheated people.
This is one of the few cases where the illegal earnings of chitfund companies have been blocked by attaching them under criminal provisions of law.
The court has termed the money, totalling Rs 16,303,509.59 and kept in nine bank accounts in Bangalore and Ambala, as “proceeds of crime and involved in money laundering” and has attached the amount paving way for confiscation of this amount by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The case dates back to 2011 when Haryana and Punjab police registered a case of cheating and fraud against a number of owners and directors in Panipat, Gurdaspur and Pathankot for cheating lakhs of investors by floating firms named “Unipay 2U Marketing Pvt Ltd, Unigateway2U Trading Pvt Ltd and principal company based in Malaysia — Best Genius SDN BHD”.
The ED took over the case in 2012 suspecting large scale money laundering and blackmoney and registered an offence under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
“It appears that the provisional attachment order (issued by ED in January this year) attaching the balances in the bank accounts are nothing but a proceeds of crime and are involved in money laundering,” the June 4 order of Member Adjudicating Authority (PMLA) S K Sharma said.
The order was, however, issued “ex-parte” as none of the accused appeared before the court to defend themselves.
The authority is the judicial body to decide on attachment orders issued by the ED and acts as a grievance redressal office for the accused if they think that the ED action was not justified. These orders can be further challenged in the High Court.
The ED complaint (FIR) of 2012 stated that “several investors were cheated on account of large scale cyber fraud committed by the said companies. They have syphoned out crores of Indian rupees in execution of ponzi/pyramid scheme and investors were allured on account of assurances of exorbitant returns, which were initially doled out in order to win over the confidence of greater number of people.
“Subsequently, thousands of people across the country had invested crores of rupees in the said ponzi schemes, the companies stopped the payouts/monthly returns since October 2010 and gradually syphoned off crores of rupees of investors,” the attachment order said.
The ED investigation found that the schemes floated by these companies cleverly “claimed to make the amount more than double within ten months.”
“The said scheme worked on various complex multilevel marketing techniques of referrals and binary system, the person already investing in the scheme and having an ID number only could refer a new investor and in order to receive the 10 per cent of the references down line, there was binary system whereby both the sides of the individual had to make equivalent investments,” the agency probe report said.
A website– www.Unipay2U.Com– was floated again after payments were stopped by the directors of these firms in 2010 to fraudulently “extract more money from the investors”, the agency said in its report.
The ED report also stated that “all directors of the firm are absconding and red corner notices have been issued on the directions of the court of Raipur, Chhattisgarh in respect of Mugandhan Gangam, S Bhaskar and R K Vetrichelvan.”
The ponzi or chitfund schemes recently made news following allegations that thousands of investors were duped of their legitimate earnings and deposits by West Bengal based Saradha group of companies.
The government has not only initiated a multi-department probe in this case but it has also constituted an Inter Ministerial Group to curb and cripple such fraud schemes in the country which ruins the lives of gullible investors by robbing crores of rupees. (PTI)
Follow our WhatsApp channel