Mumbai: The Enforcement Directorate arrested an advocate at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport on Saturday as he was about to board a flight to Delhi, in a money-laundering probe that has grown from one woman's complaint into a pan-India investigation.
Rashesh Upadhyay, also known as Rashesh Shah, was intercepted at a boarding gate by the ED's Panaji unit, with help from Customs and CISF personnel. He was taken to Goa and produced before a special court under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, which remanded him to ED custody until October 29. He is the seventh person arrested in the case.
The case began with an FIR registered by Goa Police on June 9, 2025, after a woman in Goa reported losing ₹2.60 crore. According to the ED, she was placed under "digital arrest" between May 21 and June 2, 2025 by people posing as government officials and pressured into transferring money into multiple accounts.
The agency described Upadhyay as a "key node" in the network. Its allegation is specific: that he helped get bank accounts linked to the network unfrozen after police complaints led to them being frozen, and that he arranged this by bribing officials of the agencies concerned, with payments routed through "Angadiyas", a private network of people who deal in cash. The ED also alleges that although he was enrolled as an advocate, he had neither appeared nor filed a vakalatnama for any accused person or their companies.
Money from the Goa complainant, the agency says, moved through about 400 mule accounts linked to commodity, travel and foreign exchange companies run through dummy directors. Funds were withdrawn in cash and converted into foreign currency through money changers licensed by the Reserve Bank of India.
The numbers the ED has put on record are large. The network, it says, handled banking transactions worth nearly ₹28,000 crore and deposited about ₹2,900 crore in cash. Accounts linked to it have surfaced in more than 300 victim complaints and over 160 FIRs across 20 states and Union Territories, with reported losses exceeding ₹400 crore. The ₹28,000 crore figure refers to transactions examined in the investigation, not established fraud losses.
Investigators are now trying to identify the officials who allegedly accepted bribes, along with the Angadiyas and other intermediaries, and to trace the proceeds of crime.
Digital arrest is not a legal procedure in India. Complaints can be made on the national cybercrime helpline 1930 or at cybercrime.gov.in.