Ahmedabad CFO Hardik Soni lost $81,700 after a match on the Sangam matrimonial app steered him to a fake crypto trading site. Police say the same network may be targeting other victims.
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A 33-year-old chief financial officer in Ahmedabad lost $81,700, or ₹78.99 lakh, to a crypto investment fraud that started on a matrimonial app, police said. Hardik Chandrakantbhai Soni downloaded the Sangam app in March 2025 looking for a partner. He matched with a profile named Harshitha Gondawith on May 8, 2025. Within days the conversation moved to WhatsApp.
Over the next few weeks the woman pitched cryptocurrency trading, claiming big wins. She told Soni the profits had bought a house in central Berlin and sent video proof. Soni initially resisted but eventually gave in, police said.
She directed him to a trading site, m[.]bitcoin-on[.]com. To register he had to provide his name, email, phone number and driving license. A customer support agent told him to send money to a rotating set of bank accounts. Each time he sent a screenshot of the transfer receipt, a corresponding USDT credit appeared on his dashboard.
Deposits ran from May 8, 2025 to January 26, 2026. Individual installments ranged from $104, or ₹10,000, to more than $10,355, or ₹10 lakh. The total came to $81,700. The profits and balance shown on the dashboard kept rising. None of it was real.
When Soni tried to withdraw his principal and the claimed profits, the operators demanded more money for taxes, processing fees and verification costs. He paid some of those extra charges. Nothing came back to him.
Soni filed a complaint on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. An FIR was registered with Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police. The complaint names the matrimonial profile Harshitha-FS64217032 as the account that managed the WhatsApp number and the entire scam operation, police said. Police believe other victims exist.
Similar cases have appeared. Civil contractor Ramesh lost about $200,000, or ₹1.67 crore, to a woman named Priyanka he met on a matrimonial website. She claimed to work for a Singapore-based crypto trading firm. A first deposit of ₹50,000, about $600, generated an instant ₹8,300 profit, about $100. That led to much larger transfers through UPI and bank channels. The moment he tried to take money out, his wallet locked. The scammer then asked for another ₹25 lakh, about $30,000, and disappeared.
In another incident, Ashok Vijayvargiya, a 70-year-old chartered accountant who serves as chief returning officer of the Madhya Pradesh Chamber of Commerce, lost ₹21.06 crore, about $2.2 million. He befriended a con artist on social media who called herself Divya. The same fake-profit, frozen-withdrawal script played out, Cryptopolitan reported.
Cybercrime expert and former IPS officer Prof. Triveni Singh said criminals target matrimonial and social platforms because a level of trust exists before money enters the picture. He said that before sending money to any investment platform, people should do their own research. Property videos and screenshots of returns are red flags, he added.
Soni's loss shows how a standard script works: a fake profile on a dating app, a move to a private messaging platform, a pitch for crypto trading with fabricated profits, a controlled demo site, deposits into rotating bank accounts, and a withdrawal block that triggers more demands for fees. The deposits were accepted over eight months, suggesting the operators had a working payment infrastructure and a patient playbook.
Police in Ahmedabad are investigating whether the same network behind the Harshitha profile is linked to the other cases in different states. No arrests have been reported.
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