India's Directorate of Enforcement (ED) announced that it has frozen 77.62710139 bitcoins in accordance with the country's Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
77.6 bitcoins transferred to Binance by the Indian cryptocurrency exchange Wazirx. The freezing is part of an investigation into money laundering into a mobile gaming application.
On September 28, India's Directorate of Enforcement (ED) announced that it has frozen 77.62710139 bitcoins in accordance with the country's Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
The freezing is part of the ED's investigation into E-nuggets, a mobile gaming app. As per the announcement, the cryptocurrency was transferred from Wazirx, a popular Indian exchange, to Binance. In addition, the ED tweeted a summary of its action.
The law enforcement agency stated that "Aamir Khan, son of Nesar Ahmed Khan, developed a mobile gaming app called E-Nuggets with the intention of defrauding the public," adding:
“Withdrawals from the aforementioned app were momentarily suspended after collecting a significant sum of funds from the public for one reason or another. Following that, all data including profile information was deleted from the app servers.”
The ED stated that its investigations found that the accused moved a portion of the illegally generated funds overseas via the Indian crypto exchange Wazirx.
The accused reportedly opened a fake account in the name of Sima Naskar with Wazirx and utilized it to purchase cryptocurrencies, the ED further described, elaborating:
“Following that, the aforementioned cryptocurrencies were moved to another account on another cryptocurrency exchange, namely Binance.”
“The balance of allegedly transferred cryptocurrency, 77.62710139 BTCs (roughly Rs 12.83 crore) at Binance crypto exchange, has been frozen,” according to the ED.
In 2019, Binance was believed to have acquired Wazirx. However, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has stated that the acquisition was never finalized, underlining that Binance has never — at any point — owned any shares of Zanmai Labs, the company that operates Wazirx.
In August, the ED froze Wazirx's bank assets totaling more than $8M. However, Wazirx said earlier this month that its bank accounts had been unfrozen. Following Wazirx, the ED froze $46 million in crypto and bank assets of Vauld, a crypto platform backed by Peter Thiel. In August, the agency carried out an investigation of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinswitch Kuber. However, the exchange's CEO stated that it had nothing to do with money laundering investigations.
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