The Aryavarth Express
Agency( Mumbai): The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has immobilized Rs 123 crore held by shell companies based in Singapore within the bank accounts of Mumbai’s NIUM India Pvt Ltd, as part of an investigation into a money laundering operation involving illicit online loan, gambling, and betting applications via a series of dummy accounts in Kerala. The funds were seized after conducting raids last week at ten locations across Mumbai, Chennai, and Kochi at the offices of NIUM India Pvt Ltd and its directors in Mumbai, alongside Xoduz Solution Pvt Ltd, Vikrah Trading Enterprises Pvt Ltd, Tyrannus Technology Pvt Ltd, Future Vision Media Solutions Pvt Ltd, Aprikiwi Solution Pvt Ltd in Chennai, and Raphael James Rozario in Kochi, aiming to track down and recover illicit proceeds related to the case.
According to the ED, the Rs 123 crore now frozen is believed to be illicit gains linked to Singaporean shell firms and deposited in the accounts of NIUM Indian Pvt. Ltd on their behalf. During the operations, the ED also confiscated various digital devices, incriminating documents, numerous bank accounts utilized for money laundering, and information on various assets owned by the accused individuals and companies. The probe was initiated following complaints filed with the Kerala and Haryana Police, alleging exploitation and deception through online platforms, including loan, gambling, and betting apps, managed by Chinese companies.
The ED’s investigation uncovered that the illicit proceeds from these apps and other platforms were collected and laundered through dummy accounts opened in several Kerala banks using payment aggregators. The laundered money was then routed through multiple shell companies in Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai before being sent abroad through mechanisms like cryptocurrency, fake software imports from Singapore, and foreign exchange currency purchases. The accused had established numerous shell companies within India to transfer the crime proceeds to similar entities in Singapore.
These Singapore-based shell companies would issue fraudulent invoices for software supply and other services to the Indian shell entities, where the crime proceeds had already been gathered. These invoices were facilitated by a global forex settlement platform, NIUM Singapore Pte Ltd (Singapore), with its Indian subsidiary, NIUM India Pvt Ltd, collecting the funds from Indian entities based on these bogus invoices and then transferring them as outward remittances to NIUM Singapore Pte Ltd for technical services payments, subsequently crediting the funds to the virtual wallets of the Singapore shell entities. According to the ED, NIUM India Pvt Ltd did not collect any documentation from the remitters other than the fake invoices, thus hiding the true nature of these transactions from banks and regulatory bodies and enabling the laundering of proceeds out of India.