A Lucknow businessman’s routine financial audit has uncovered what he alleges is a ₹37 crore fraud carried out through his demat account, with a former ICICI Bank branch manager and a former regional head of ICICI Securities now named as accused. Ghazipur police registered an FIR only after businessman Amit Agarwal moved court, following an initial complaint that police did not act upon.
Agarwal has accused Aman Ajit, then manager of the ICICI Bank branch in Ghazipur, and Vishal Arya, then regional head of ICICI Securities Limited in Aliganj, of colluding to siphon funds from his account without his knowledge. The allegations remain unproven, but the case has already drawn attention for the scale of the alleged fraud and the seniority of the officials named.
An audit that exposed a hidden trail
According to the complaint, Agarwal withdrew ₹13 crore from his bank account in May 2023 and routed it to ICICI Securities in Aliganj, later adding further funds to his demat account in April 2024 after profitable trades. For an extended period, he says he remained unaware of any irregularity in how these funds were being handled.
The alleged fraud came to light only on January 30, 2026, when Agarwal had his financial records independently audited. That review, he claims, revealed transactions worth close to ₹37 crore executed through his demat account without his authorisation or knowledge, a gap between actual activity and what he believed was happening that went undetected for a considerable stretch of time.
Agarwal has alleged that electronic records were manipulated and that forged documents were created in his name to facilitate the transactions. He believes such changes could not have occurred through ordinary banking procedures alone, suggesting instead that specialised technical access or software may have been involved, a claim investigators will need to test against the bank’s own audit trails.
A pattern familiar to regulators
Insider-enabled financial fraud of this kind is not unique to Ghazipur. Government data placed before the Rajya Sabha earlier this year recorded 1,935 fraud cases specifically involving bank employees in the 2025 financial year, and separate research citing Reserve Bank of India figures has found that roughly a third of banking frauds nationally originate internally, involving staff with system access rather than external hackers. Chennai’s Central Crime Branch arrested 49 bank employees across 18 such cases last year alone, several involving forged signatures used to divert customer funds.
The securities side faces a parallel challenge. The Reserve Bank’s Financial Stability Report this year identified fraudulent demat accounts as the third-largest channel used to layer proceeds of cyber fraud, trailing only cryptocurrency and prepaid instruments, with regulatory recovery rates in comparable cases remaining strikingly low. Cases combining insider banking access with securities-side manipulation, as alleged here, are particularly difficult to prevent or prosecute, since they exploit legitimate credentials rather than technical break-ins.
Court intervention before police action
Agarwal’s account of how the FIR came to be registered highlights a recurring friction point in Indian white-collar fraud cases: the gap between filing a complaint and securing police action. He says his initial approach to the police did not yield the response he expected, prompting him to seek relief through the court instead. Only after judicial directions were issued did Ghazipur police register the case.
That sequence is now shaping the investigation’s early priorities. Police are collecting documents and evidence directly from Agarwal, while notices are expected to be issued to the concerned bank and securities firm seeking account records, transaction statements and internal authorisation logs tied to both the bank account and the demat account.
Tracing the digital footprint
Investigators are expected to focus heavily on electronic evidence, including login records, transaction authorisation logs and audit trails that could establish who accessed or altered the account information and when. Establishing whether unauthorised credentials were used, or whether changes originated from within the bank’s own systems, will likely determine how the case against the two named officials proceeds.
Bank statements, demat records and the disputed documents will be cross-checked against originals to assess their authenticity, a process that typically forms the evidentiary backbone of such cases. The movement of the alleged ₹37 crore, including the accounts it may have passed through, is expected to remain the investigation’s central focus in the weeks ahead.
Should the evidence support Agarwal’s allegations, further legal action against the named officials is likely to follow, though police have given no timeline. For now, the case rests on an unresolved question only a forensic reconstruction can answer: how ₹37 crore moved through a demat account without its owner’s knowledge for as long as it apparently did.
“Cases where an insider’s legitimate access is used to manipulate electronic records are especially hard to detect early, precisely because the activity looks routine to the system until an independent audit forces a reconciliation,” said Prof. Triveni Singh, a cybercrime expert and former IPS officer.
