CoinDCX co-founders Sumit Surendra Gupta and Niraj Ashok Khandelwal have secured bail from a magistrate court in Thane, India, after a cheating complaint linked them to a fake platform that posed as the crypto exchange.
Summary
- CoinDCX founders received bail after the court found no prima facie case against them initially.
- The court said another person impersonated the accused and carried out the cheating scheme there.
- CoinDCX linked the complaint to a fake website and warned users about phishing risks.
Meanwhile, the court said no prima facie case was made out against them in the 71 lakh Indian rupees complaint and allowed their release on bond. The magistrate court issued a common order on March 23 on the bail applications filed by Gupta and Khandelwal. The order said the available material did not show a case against them, even at an initial stage.
The court also recorded that the investigation officer had “no objection” to their release. It added that the two founders were not present in Mumbra when the alleged offence took place, which weakened the complaint filed against them.
The case began after an investor claimed he had been cheated in a deal linked to CoinDCX. The founders were taken in for questioning on Saturday and remained in custody over the weekend before the court heard their bail plea.
During the hearing, the court noted that “some other person by representing as accused cheated the informant,” and said the informant had admitted that fact in court. This point became central to the bail order because it shifted focus away from the CoinDCX founders and toward other individuals tied to the alleged fraud.
In a March 24 statement posted on X, CoinDCX said the court process supported a “third-party impersonation” case. The company said the fraud took place through a lookalike website, coindcx.pro, which it said had no link to its official business.
The judge also referred to an affidavit filed by the informant. In that affidavit, the informant said another accused, Rana, had repaid the lost money and confirmed that the two CoinDCX founders were not the people he met at a café in Kausa Mumbra where the deal happened.
Bail conditions and fraud warning
The court said the matter had been “amicably settled” between the informant and the main accused. Based on that, it found no risk that the founders would interfere with witnesses or evidence if released.
Each founder was granted bail on a 50,000 Indian rupee bond. They must cooperate with the investigation and trial. CoinDCX later said the case reflects a wider rise in phishing and impersonation scams in India’s financial and crypto sectors, and urged users to verify website domains and use only official company channels.
