India’s financial crime fighting agency has frozen over US$1.5 million in cryptocurrencies as part of a money laundering investigation against mobile gaming application E-nuggets, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said on Wednesday.
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Fast facts
- The ED launched a money laundering investigation against E-Nuggets founder Aamir Khan “and others,” after authorities in the eastern city of Kolkata filed a complaint against the suspects in February last year.
- E-Nuggets was allegedly designed to defraud the general public, the ED said.
- The app allegedly disabled withdrawals after collecting a significant amount of money from users and all data were erased from the app servers.
- The ED said its investigation revealed that the accused transferred some illegal profits from the gaming app to overseas accounts.
- The accused used a dummy account to purchase crypto on Indian exchange WazirX before transferring the assets to Binance exchange, the agency said.
- “We can confirm that Binance froze the funds at the request of the Enforcement Directorate. It’s our position to cooperate fully and collaboratively with all legally valid requests and inquiries,” Binance told Forkast in an email.
- “WazirX has been cooperating with the ED by providing them with all the necessary details, information and documents of the alleged accused sought by the investigators,” WazirX told Forkast via text message.
- Earlier this month, an ED-led raid at Khan’s residence led to the recovery of about US$2.1 million.
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