Police in Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district have registered a case against five people accused of defrauding seven investors of ₹1.08 crore. The scheme combined promises of monthly returns with a purported digital coin windfall. The FIR was filed at Karnailganj Police Station.
Investigators have now begun tracing bank accounts, digital transactions and call records to establish how widely the alleged network operated.
A Pitch Built on Monthly Returns and a Future Coin
According to the complaint, Rajneesh Roshan, a Lucknow resident, introduced the seven investors to a scheme built around a company called Vodvo. He promised monthly returns of 5 to 6 percent, along with an eventual windfall from a digital coin called TLC 2.0, which investors were told would someday be worth lakhs of rupees.
Investors were directed to deposit money into the account of Captor Money Solution Private Limited. He reportedly showed them online records listing Shilpi Singh and Deepak Kumar as the company’s directors.
The amounts involved varied sharply across the seven complainants. Baikunth Kumar alone deposited ₹54.60 lakh and Gufran ₹37 lakh, while smaller sums ranging from ₹2.10 lakh to ₹7 lakh came from the remaining investors, together totalling ₹1.08 crore.
Police say the group initially received small interest payments, a pattern common to schemes designed to build confidence before the returns stop altogether. Payments eventually ceased, and those running the company stopped responding to calls, according to the complaint.
Investors further allege that Rajneesh Roshan warned that anyone pursuing the matter with Chauhan could face threats. Police are now examining this allegation alongside the financial evidence.
Trust Borrowed From a Local Reputation
Part of what allowed the scheme to gain traction, according to the complaint, was its proximity to a recognisable local figure. Investors say their confidence in the scheme grew because Shilpi Singh, listed as a company director, is the wife of Rahul Singh Chauhan, a local social worker.
This pattern recurs across many of India’s regional investment frauds. Schemes lean on an existing community reputation rather than any independent financial credential, substituting personal trust for the regulatory verification that a genuine investment vehicle would require.
A Coin With a Troubled National History
The TLC 2.0 name attached to this case is not new to Indian investigators. Coins branded Trillioner or TLC have surfaced repeatedly in a much larger, ongoing probe into a multi-level marketing and forex trading network that expanded into cryptocurrency. That larger network has drawn scrutiny from the Enforcement Directorate over alleged fund flows running into hundreds of crores, along with asset attachments under anti-money-laundering law.
Whether the Gonda case has any direct link to that larger network remains unconfirmed. But the recurrence of the same coin branding across unrelated regional complaints suggests a pattern: local operators borrowing the credibility of a nationally circulated crypto pitch to sell what is, at the ground level, a standard Ponzi-style promise of fixed monthly returns.
What Investigators Are Watching For
Police say the current investigation is examining bank statements, mobile call records, digital transaction logs and company documents. The goal is to trace how the ₹1.08 crore moved and whether additional investors were targeted through the same network.
Officials have also indicated the probe may widen if evidence emerges connecting the scheme to overseas fund transfers or international financial networks. This possibility is consistent with the offshore routing seen in comparable forex and crypto-linked fraud cases elsewhere in the state.
For now, the allegations remain under investigation, with no conclusions yet reached. The case adds to a growing list of Uttar Pradesh prosecutions in which digital coin schemes, dressed in the language of high-tech finance, have collapsed into conventional Ponzi structures once new investor money stopped flowing in.
