The victim, identified as Kuldeep Patel, who was working as a software engineer at a firm in Gandhinagar city of Gujarat filed a complaint at the cybercrime police. He claimed to have lost over INR10 million after falling prey to a cryptocurrency scam.

Patel in his first information said that he met a woman named Aditi on a matrimonial site in June who told him that she had an import and export business in the UK and asked him to invest in ‘banocoin’ to increase his earnings.

The victim agreed and spoke to an alleged representative of Banocoin and began investing money after registering himself on their website hoping to get good returns on his investment.

Initially, he made an investment of INR100,000. Seeing that he made a profit of 78 USDT (US dollar tether), Patel invested more amount and ended up investing a huge amount of money across 18 transactions between July 20 and August 31.

Patel contacted the customer care representative on September 3, when he was told that his account was frozen after he tried to withdraw INR259,000 from his account.

He was asked to invest another amount of INR350,000 to de-freeze his account. Patel realised that he had been scammed when he tried contacting Aditi who was not responding.