Probe Agency ED Attaches Yacht, Assets Worth Rs 131 Crore In Forex Case

A yacht, a boat, two houses and some other assets located in Spain and worth more than Rs 131 crore have been attached under the anti-money laundering law in a case against a "fraud" forex-trading platform that has allegedly cheated numerous investors, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said on Thursday.

The platform is named OctaFX.

"These assets belong to Pavel Prozorov, the mastermind behind OctaFX," the federal probe agency said in a statement.

A provisional order has been issued under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to attach a luxury yacht, a minijet boat, a costly car and two residential properties in Spain. These are worth Rs 131.45 crore, the ED said.

The yacht, named "Cherry", is an Italian-model commercial vessel cruising in the western Mediterranean, it added.

The money-laundering probe stems from an FIR of the Pune Police (Shivaji Nagar police station) against several individuals on charges of defrauding investors by falsely promising high returns through the OctaFX forex-trading platform.

OctaFX, the ED said, is an unauthorised forex broker promoted via the Indian Premiere League (IPL) cricket tournament, social media and celebrities, and it "laundered" funds by collecting investors' money through mule accounts in the names of fake e-commerce firms.

These shell (bogus) firms, with dummy directors and manipulated KYCs, accessed payment gateways posing as legitimate merchants, the ED has found.

It was detected that funds were routed through "unauthorised" payment aggregators and escrow accounts, adding layers to obscure ownership and the transaction purpose.

OctaFX "deliberately" changed its login URLs and web addresses to obscure its fraudulent operations from investors. The platform "manipulated" trades to cause significant investor losses while siphoning funds into e-wallets and accounts of fictitious entities, the agency said.

The platform is suspected to have generated "proceeds of crime" amounting to at least Rs 800 crore from its operations in India in just nine months, the ED said.

The agency suspects that funds cheated from the investors were siphoned out of India in the guise of fake import of services to entities controlled by Prozorov in countries like Spain, Estonia, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE and the UK.

The agency had earlier attached assets worth Rs 296 crore, including 19 properties in Spain owned by Prozorov. It has filed two chargesheets in the case till now, naming OctaFX and 54 other entities as accused.

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