CoinDCX co-founders Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal arrested over Rs 71.6 lakh fraud FIR. Exchange blames impersonators, flags 1,212 fake websites.
Two names. Bengaluru. Handcuffs nobody expected.
A Mumbra police team flew to Bengaluru on Saturday. They came back with Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founders of CoinDCX. A Thane holiday court then sent both men to police custody through March 23.
The charges are serious. Cheating, criminal breach of trust, and fraud under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita provisions. Senior inspector Anil Shinde confirmed all three, per The Times of India.
Six people total are named in the FIR. Four others alongside the founders: Akash Rana, Rahul Gupta, P. Vasudev, Shivam Sharma.
The Victim Nobody Warned in Time
A 42-year-old insurance consultant from Mumbra filed the complaint on March 16. He says he lost Rs 71.6 lakh. The scheme ran from August 2025 through February 2026, promising 10 to 12 percent returns. A franchise opportunity was part of the pitch too.
CoinDCX says he never contacted the actual exchange before filing. Not once. A source close to the case told Moneycontrol the fraud ran entirely through a fake domain. That domain: coindcx.pro.
Nothing to do with the real platform. That is the company’s position.
The official CoinDCX account on X called the FIR “false and filed as a conspiracy against CoinDCX by impersonators posing as Founders.” The funds cited in the complaint, the exchange said, went to third-party accounts. Accounts with zero relation to CoinDCX.
A public notice was already up. The CoinDCX security page had been warning users about impersonators before this arrest ever happened. That detail matters more than it looks.
1,212 Sites. One Victim. Read That Again.
Between April 1, 2024 and January 5, 2026, CoinDCX reported over 1,212 fake websites impersonating coindcx.com. That figure came directly from the statement on X. One of those flagged domains was coindcx.pro. The exact domain used in this case.
Economic Times confirmed both founders were brought from Bengaluru to Thane after the arrest. The court remanded them to custody until Monday. The paper also reported those 1,200-plus fraudulent domains were flagged and reported well before this FIR landed.
The documentation existed. March 16 came after all of it.
India’s Ministry of Home Affairs data puts investment scams at 76% of all financial cybercrime losses nationally in 2025. That number alone tells a story. Impersonation attacks targeting Indian crypto platforms have been growing at a pace few saw coming, with AI-built fake sites replicating real exchanges down to the login page.
CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn back in 2021. Ninety million dollars raised at a $1.1 billion valuation. 20 million registered users on the platform today.
None of that stopped the Bengaluru arrest.
What X Looks Like When Trust Breaks Down
The denial post on X did not land in silence. Not even close.
@JDN1572922 on X tagged Prime Minister Modi, Finance Minister Sitharaman, @nsitharamanoffc, and @PiyushGoyal in the same breath. He wrote that he lost 38 lakhs 20 months back because of CoinDCX itself. Not a fake site. He alleged the exchange stopped trading on purpose before prices dropped. In a separate reply to @guptatrapti45 on X, he backed calls for a forensic audit and demanded maximum punishment for those responsible.
@Himflantl on X said nothing about impersonators. Just this: “I reported what you did with my account but you never gave me a satisfactory answer. Karma is real.”
Short. No numbers. No tags. But difficult to ignore.
@AM60762792 on X brought up something else entirely. The user claimed CoinDCX listed a token called AI16Z, then that token vanished from the platform. What replaced it was a token called ELIZAOS. Invested amounts were reportedly swapped across without consent. ELIZAOS then got dumped to near zero. CoinDCX has not addressed this claim publicly.
@KarthiDiwa7194 on X accused the exchange of removing a token called MASA from spot trading. No formal notice given to users beforehand. @Pramod_indoria on X told followers publicly to stop using CoinDCX, pointing to coin delistings as one method of cheating users. @prabhpandher on X called it a “fraud company” outright, saying both he and friends lost hard-earned money on the platform.
These complaints predate the FIR. They do not match the specific fraud alleged in the complaint. But they show a community that was already boiling before March 16.
One Exchange. Two Arrests. Twelve Months.
This is not CoinDCX’s first custody situation in under a year. In July 2025, the exchange lost $44.2 million after malware got installed on an employee’s laptop. A software engineer, Rahul Agarwal, was later arrested in connection with that breach. The company said user funds were untouched. The full loss was absorbed by the exchange itself.
Now the co-founders sit in a Thane court’s custody. The Block noted both events in the same report. Business Standard flagged the same uncomfortable pattern.
Per Times of India, police are expected to seek further custody when Gupta and Khandelwal are produced before the Thane court again on March 23. The exchange told authorities it remains fully committed to cooperating with the investigation, as stated on X.
Whether this cracks open as a clean impersonation case or reveals something else is what the next hearing will start to answer.
