A WhatsApp message from a stranger calling herself Aditi Verma has cost a Sant Raghuvar Nagar resident ₹13 lakh, after she convinced him over six weeks that a cloned trading interface bearing Upstox’s name was a genuine gateway to stock market profits. Dileep Singh’s case, now registered with Varanasi’s Sigra police station, adds to a mounting body of near-identical frauds that have repeatedly exploited the credibility of India’s established brokerage names.
According to Singh’s complaint, the woman first contacted him on 2 June, introducing an investment opportunity through an application called Upstox DMA that promised substantial trading profits. Between 16 June and 30 July, he transferred roughly ₹13 lakh in instalments, drawing the funds from his wife Ruchita Singh’s savings account with Indian Bank, before realising the promised returns and his principal amount had both become unreachable.
A Fraud Pattern Upstox Itself Has Repeatedly Flagged
The specific brand exploited in Singh’s case is no coincidence. Upstox has run a sustained public awareness campaign since 2024 after its cybersecurity team identified scammers systematically creating fake social media accounts, applications, WhatsApp groups and websites impersonating the company, targeting its base of over 1.4 crore customers with fabricated stock tips and guaranteed-return promises. In one comparable case, a Delhi woman lost ₹24 lakh after being added to a WhatsApp group calling itself “V5-VIP Upstox Services Group,” administered by someone posing as an Upstox representative.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India has separately documented this impersonation pattern in formal circulars, warning that fraudsters routinely forge SEBI-style certificates, replicate genuine registration numbers and build professional-looking interfaces indistinguishable from authentic platforms at a casual glance. SEBI’s April 2025 circular specifically cautioned that such schemes typically display small initial profits to establish trust before persuading victims toward larger, ultimately unrecoverable transfers, a sequence that mirrors almost exactly what Singh describes experiencing.
SEBI’s Verified Badge Arrives Too Late for This Case
In March 2026, SEBI partnered with Google to introduce a “Verified” label appearing on Google Play Store listings for trading apps genuinely tied to SEBI-registered brokers, an initiative SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey described as necessary because fake apps had become a serious threat capable of causing irreparable financial harm. The rollout initially covers around 600 broker apps, with SEBI reporting that more than 1.3 lakh misleading investment-related posts have already been escalated for takedown and roughly 66 fraudulent trading apps removed from app stores under the initiative.
This verification system directly addresses the exact vulnerability Singh’s case exposes, since fraudulent apps rarely fail on functionality or visual polish; they fail specifically on legitimacy, relying on convincing imitation to survive a quick glance rather than genuine regulatory scrutiny. Had the badge system been more widely adopted and known to investors at the time Singh downloaded the Upstox DMA application, the absence of a verified label might have offered an immediate warning sign.
What Remains the Investor’s Responsibility
Cybercrime officials investigating the Varanasi case continue to stress that verifying a broker’s SEBI registration number directly through the regulator’s official website remains the single most reliable safeguard available, since claimed registration numbers and forged certificates circulated through WhatsApp groups cannot be taken at face value. Investors are also being cautioned against transferring investment funds to personal bank accounts rather than verified corporate or brokerage accounts, a red flag present in numerous similar cases nationally.
With India’s retail investor base now exceeding 140 million people, the gap between the pace of onboarding new investors and the pace of investor education around app verification continues to leave openings for schemes exactly like the one that reached Dileep Singh. Investigators in the Varanasi case are now examining the payment trail and the digital identity behind the WhatsApp communication to determine whether the network responsible has defrauded other victims through the same impersonation tactic.
