A magistrate court in Thane, India, has granted bail to CoinDCX co-founders Sumit Surendra Gupta and Niraj Ashok Khandelwal, ruling that no prima facie case was made out against them in a 71 lakh Indian rupees ($75,000) cheating complaint linked to a fake trading platform posing as the Indian crypto exchange.
The court’s common order on March 23 on their bail applications concluded that they were entitled to bail because no case was made out against them, even on an initial look at the available evidence. The founders were taken in for questioning on Saturday and remanded over the weekend after a complaint alleged they had duped an investor.
In the order, the magistrate recorded that the investigation officer had “no objection” to their release and that the applicants were not present in Mumbra when the alleged offence took place, adding that “some other person by representing as accused cheated the informant,” a fact the informant has admitted in court.
CoinDCX says bail order backs “third‑party impersonation”
In a March 24 statement on X, CoinDCX said the court proceedings supported a “third-party impersonation” scenario and that the fraud occurred on a lookalike site, coindcx.pro, which it said had no connection to the company.
The judge noted that the informant filed an affidavit stating that another accused, Rana, had repaid him the cheated amount and that the applicants are not the persons he met at a café in Kausa Mumbra where the fraudulent deal was struck.
With the matter “amicably settled” between the informant and the main accused, the court said there was no question of the founders tampering with evidence or witnesses.
Each was ordered released on bail upon executing a 50,000 Indian rupee bond (roughly $530) on condition that they cooperate with the investigation and trial.
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CoinDCX framed the episode as part of a broader rise in impersonation and phishing scams targeting well-known brands in India’s financial and crypto sectors, urging users to verify domains and only interact with the exchange’s official platform and social media profiles.
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