A 33-year-old Chief Financial Officer at a private company in Ahmedabad has allegedly lost ₹78.99 lakh to a fraud that began not with a suspicious message but with a matrimonial profile, a reminder of how thoroughly cybercriminals have learned to weaponise the trust built into platforms designed for something entirely different. Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police have registered a case and launched an investigation, which they believe points to an organised network operating well beyond this single victim.
A Relationship That Became a Pitch
The complainant, Hardik Chandrakantbhai Soni, a resident of Shayona Fairmont in Vadaj, told police he subscribed to the Sangam matrimonial app in March 2025 while searching for a life partner. On May 8, 2025, he came across the profile of a woman identifying herself as Harshitha Gondawith, and the two moved their conversation from the app to WhatsApp, where a relationship of sorts developed over subsequent weeks.
Police say the woman gradually built Soni’s trust before introducing the idea of cryptocurrency investment, claiming she had earned substantial profits trading crypto and had even purchased a house in central Berlin using those earnings, going so far as to share videos of the property to lend the claim visual credibility. Soni initially declined to invest, but after repeated persuasion, he agreed to explore what she was offering.
The Mechanics of the Trap
The woman allegedly directed him to a cryptocurrency trading website, m.bitcoin-on.com, where he was asked to create an account using his name, email, mobile number and driving licence details, a level of personal data collection that itself should have raised concern but is now a familiar early step in this style of fraud. Investigators found that customer support representatives linked to the site instructed him to transfer money into a rotating set of bank accounts, requesting a screenshot of each transaction receipt in return for an equivalent credit in USDT, a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, on his supposed trading account.
Between May 8, 2025 and January 26, 2026, Soni transferred amounts ranging from ₹10,000 to over ₹10 lakh across multiple instalments, eventually totalling ₹78.99 lakh. The platform displayed steadily rising profits and account balances throughout this period, precisely the kind of visible, if entirely fabricated, growth that keeps victims investing rather than questioning the scheme.
The Familiar Withdrawal Trap
The fraud became apparent only when Soni attempted to withdraw both his principal and his supposed profits. He alleges the platform’s operators repeatedly demanded further payments framed as taxes, processing charges and verification fees, a pattern investigators across India have documented in case after case of matrimonial-linked crypto fraud, where victims are kept paying incrementally larger sums chasing money that was never real to begin with. Despite making several additional payments, Soni received neither his invested amount nor the promised returns.
He first filed a complaint on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal before approaching Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police directly to lodge a formal FIR, which names the matrimonial profile Harshitha-FS64217032, the operator of the associated WhatsApp number, those behind the fraudulent trading website, and the holders of the bank accounts that received his funds, alongside other individuals who may emerge as the investigation proceeds.
Part of a Well-Documented National Pattern
Soni’s case closely mirrors similar frauds reported elsewhere in India in recent months, including a Hyderabad widower who lost ₹86 lakh after a matrimonial contact claiming to be a forex trader shared fabricated profit screenshots before directing him to a fake trading site, and a separate Ahmedabad case involving a ₹15.31 crore fraud network in which victims were similarly lured through matrimonial platforms before their accounts were “locked” pending further payment. Investigators say the consistency of the method, matrimonial or social platform contact, weeks of relationship-building, a fabricated success story, a plausible-looking trading app, and an eventual withdrawal block, points to organised networks running the same playbook against multiple victims simultaneously rather than isolated individual scams.
According to renowned cybercrime expert and former IPS officer Prof Triveni Singh, cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting matrimonial and social networking platforms precisely because they lower a victim’s natural scepticism before any financial pitch is even made. He advised people to independently verify the authenticity of any investment platform, company or website before transferring money, and to treat unrealistic promises of exceptionally high returns, however convincingly supported by screenshots or shared property videos, as a clear warning sign rather than reassurance.
