Shimla, June 15 (IANS) In fresh action in a Rs 500 crore Crypto Currency Scam, the ED recovered incriminating documents and digital devices during search operations at the premises of two co-accused, an official said on Monday.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), Shimla Office, conducted search operations at the premises of Vijay Juneja and Masoom Juneja, already under arrest, under Section 17(1) of PMLA, 2002, on Monday, the ED said in a statement.

The two were associated with key accused Subhash Sharma, who has reportedly fled to Dubai, and indulged in collecting funds from nearly 2.4 lakh duped investors, the ED said.

The ED initiated an investigation based on FIRs registered by the Himachal Pradesh and Punjab Police against Subhash Sharma and others.

Investigation revealed that in 2018, Sharma, in connivance with co-accused, including Hem Raj, Sukhdev Thakur, Abhishek Sharma and Radhika Sharma, launched a cryptocurrency-based MLM scheme through an online platform to enable controlled operations and large-scale investor enrolment, the ED said.

The platform was later shifted to foreign servers (Digital Ocean) and operated through domains such as korvio.io and voscrow.com to run the scheme, the statement said.

The accused induced public investment in “Korvio Coin (KRO)” by promising assured high returns, conducting misleading seminars, manipulating token values, and introducing new tokens to sustain a Ponzi structure, wherein funds from new investors were used to pay earlier investors, it said.

To conceal their activities, digital records and domains were deleted; however, recovered data revealed more than 2.48 lakh users became victims of this financial fraud, and their total transactions exceeded $219 million, which amounted to total loss to these innocent investors to the tune of Rs 500 crore, the ED said.

This criminal nexus then carried out layering by routing the funds through numerous accounts, fictitious firms, and intermediaries, and by converting a portion into cryptocurrency to obscure the audit trail, the ED said.

After the scam came to light, Subhash Sharma reportedly fled to Dubai. Further, it is revealed that funds collected from investors were routed to Vijay Kumar Juneja and Masoom Juneja, who used them for acquiring immovable properties, said the statement.

–IANS

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