A 33-year-old CFO in Ahmedabad lost $81,700 or ₹78.99 lakh to a crypto investment fraud. It started as a match on a matrimonial app, police said. Investigators link the case to an organized network running the same script on victims across India.
A matrimonial match turns into a crypto trap
In March 2025, Hardik Chandrakantbhai Soni from Vadaj downloaded the Sangam app to find a partner. He matched with a profile named Harshitha Gondawith on May 8, 2025. Within days, the talk moved from the app to WhatsApp.
Police say she steered the chat toward cryptocurrency over the next few weeks. She told Soni about big trading wins. The winnings bought a house in central Berlin, and video proof to sell the lie. Soni had turned the pitch down at first. At last, she wore him down with her persistence.
She directed Soni to a trading site, m[.]bitcoin-on[.]com. To register, he had to give his name, email, phone number and driving license details. Then the customer support agent told him to send money to a rotating set of bank accounts. Every transfer receipt he took a screenshot of had a corresponding USDT credit on his dashboard.
Deposits were accepted from May 8, 2025 to January 26, 2026. The size of individual installments ranged from $104 or ₹10,000 to over $10,355 or ₹10 lakh.
The total was $81,700, or ₹78.99 lakh. The profits and balance shown on screen steadily increased throughout, but it was all a sham.
Soni wanted to take out his principal along with the claimed profits. Then the operators started demanding more money, calling the new charges taxes, processing fees and verification costs. Some of those extra payments cleared, but none of it was coming back to him.
Soni first registered a complaint on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. An FIR was then registered with Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police.
The complaint states Harshitha-FS64217032 is the matrimonial profile that manages the WhatsApp number and the full scam operation. Police do not believe there was only one victim in this case.
Other Indian professionals fall for crypto scams
Cryptopolitan also reported a similar case. Civil contractor Ramesh lost about $200,000, or ₹1.67 crore, to a woman who called herself Priyanka. Priyanka had met him on a matrimonial website, claiming she worked for a crypto trading firm based in Singapore.
A first deposit of ₹50,000, about $600, brought an instant ₹8,300 profit, about $100. That led him to much bigger transfers, both through UPI and bank channels. The second he tried to take money out, his wallet locked. The scammer then asked for another ₹25 lakh, about $30,000, and then disappeared.
Cryptopolitan reported another incident. Ashok Vijayvargiya, a chartered accountant who is 70 years old and also the Chief Returning Officer of the Madhya Pradesh Chamber of Commerce, was ripped off of ₹21.06 crore, which is about $2.2 million. He became friends with a con artist on social media who said her name was “Divya.” The con artist then put him through the same fake profit, frozen withdrawal scam.
Cybercrime expert and former IPS officer Prof. Triveni Singh says that criminals like matrimonial and social platforms because there is already a level of trust there before money comes into play. He says that before sending money to any investment platform, you should do your own research. He said it doesn’t matter how many property videos or screenshots are used to back up the return promises. They are red flags.