A promise of 10 per cent monthly returns and a claimed connection to an e-commerce company was enough to convince several investors in Kashmir to hand over roughly ₹2 crore before the man behind the scheme vanished. Junaid-Ul-Islam, a resident of Charar-e-Sharief in Budgam district, evaded arrest for nearly a year before the Economic Offences Wing Kashmir of the J&K Crime Branch tracked him down in Bengaluru’s Mangammanapalya area and executed a warrant issued by Srinagar’s 4th Additional Munsiff Judicial Magistrate.
The case, registered as FIR No. 07/2025 under Section 420 of the Ranbir Penal Code, followed a preliminary EOW inquiry that found prima facie evidence of cheating and financial fraud before formal proceedings began.
A Returns Promise That Outpaced Any Legitimate Business
According to investigators, Islam presented himself as an investor associated with an e-commerce company, using that framing to lend credibility to a scheme promising monthly returns of up to 10 per cent, a rate that would translate to well over 100 per cent annually and sits far beyond what any legitimate business model in e-commerce or otherwise could sustainably generate. Investors drawn in by these figures transferred money through multiple bank accounts, a dispersal pattern the EOW is now working to reconstruct in full.
As is characteristic of this fraud category, initial payments or assurances appear to have sustained investor confidence long enough for larger sums to follow, before Islam allegedly stopped honouring his commitments entirely and became unreachable, leaving investors with no recourse beyond filing a formal complaint.
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A Structural Problem Beyond This Single Case
Islam’s arrest arrives against a troubling backdrop for financial fraud recovery in Jammu and Kashmir specifically. Reserve Bank of India data submitted to the Lok Sabha shows the union territory recorded 103 financial fraud cases worth ₹193.49 crore during the 2025-26 financial year, yet only ₹6.92 crore, roughly 3.6 per cent of the total, was recovered. This recovery rate, while broadly consistent with patterns seen across cyber and financial fraud nationally, underscores why the near year-long pursuit required to apprehend a single accused in a ₹2 crore case represents a significant investigative achievement rather than routine police work.
The broader trajectory of J&K’s fraud figures adds further context: reported cases actually declined from 467 in FY 2023-24 to just 103 in FY 2025-26, even as the total amount involved surged from ₹47.55 crore to ₹193.49 crore over the same period, indicating that fraud schemes operating in the region have grown considerably larger in scale even as their frequency has fallen, consistent with a shift toward fewer but more sophisticated and higher-value operations.
Investigators Now Face the Harder Task
With Islam in custody, the EOW’s work shifts toward the more painstaking phase of tracing exactly how the collected ₹2 crore moved through the network of bank accounts identified during the investigation, and establishing whether he operated alone or as part of a coordinated group managing the scheme’s collection and disbursement. Investigators are also examining whether the promised e-commerce connection had any factual basis or existed purely as a credibility device to justify the unusually high returns on offer.
The EOW’s public messaging following the arrest has focused squarely on prevention, urging residents to treat promises of unusually high or guaranteed returns with scepticism and to independently verify the credentials, business activities and financial standing of anyone soliciting investment funds, rather than relying on verbal assurances or private communications alone. Given J&K’s low fraud recovery rate, this preventive framing carries particular weight, since the data suggests that once money moves through such schemes, meaningfully recovering it afterward remains the exception rather than the rule. The investigation into Islam’s alleged network, including the full financial trail and possible additional participants, continues.
