MUMBAI: The Mumbai unit of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has frozen ₹110 crore lying in mule bank accounts in connection with a money-laundering probe into Cyprus-based illegal betting platform Parimatch. The action followed coordinated searches at 17 locations across the country on Tuesday, including Mumbai, Surat, Delhi, Noida, Kanpur, Madurai and Hyderabad.
The platform, owned by a Ukrainian national abroad, allegedly amassed nearly ₹3,000 crore from Indian users in 2023-24 alone, luring them with promises of high returns before defrauding them, ED officials said on Thursday.
According to investigators, the frozen funds — proceeds of crime — were parked in multiple mule accounts used to layer and divert money to various recipients. Searches also led to the seizure of incriminating documents, digital devices and 1,200 credit cards linked to mule accounts.
Complex laundering network
The ED’s probe, based on a complaint by the cyber police station in Mumbai, has uncovered a multi-layered laundering operation. In south India, user deposits were allegedly funnelled into mule accounts and withdrawn in cash in parts of Tamil Nadu, before being handed to hawala operators. These operators then recharged virtual wallets of a UK-based firm, which were used to buy USDT cryptocurrency in mule accounts run by Parimatch agents.
In western India, Parimatch allegedly used Domestic Money Transfer agents to collect betting funds in mule accounts and channel them back through credit card transactions.
Investigators have also flagged payment companies whose Payment Aggregator licence applications were rejected by the Reserve Bank of India. These firms allegedly provided backend services to Parimatch disguised as Technology Service Providers (TSPs), offering Application Programming Interface (API) access to integrate mule accounts — often opened in the names of e-commerce and payment service firms — into the platform.
The funds were then “masked” as e-commerce refunds, vendor payments and other routine expenses to obscure their origin and movement, officials said.
Aggressive promotion in India
To attract customers, Parimatch invested heavily in marketing, sponsoring sports tournaments and tying up with celebrities. Indian-registered entities — ‘Parimatch Sports’ and ‘Parimatch News’ — were allegedly used for surrogate advertising, funded through foreign remittances.
A city – based businessman, who is the complainant in the Mumbai police’s case, alleged that he had lost around ₹12.22 crore at the accused illegal platform and its allied applications due to their “non adherence to fairplay”. The businessman claimed he got attracted to the accused gaming platform’s claims related to high returns, sometime in 2021, after noticing its advertisements and celebrity endorsements for it on a social media platform. “All of us who have lost any money on the accused platform should be compensated,” the complainant told HT.
