AHMEDABAD: It was too good a deal — earn 1% daily interest and double your money in 100 days. Too good to be true, hordes of rich investors in
Gujarat
realised a year later when the BitConnect platform folded up after pocketing roughly Rs 22,000 crore of their money in Bitcoin. For many, it was a double whammy after the jolt of demonetisation. In fact, the
Bitcoin
craze had started in the state as people looked for safe ways to launder their piles of black money after November 2016.
“The transactions were anonymous, it did not require any proof and, best of all, it could be operated from anywhere in the world. A cryptocurrency boom started overnight,” Sunny Vaghela, CTO of an Ahmedabad-based IT firm, told TOI. Surat became the trade’s hub with numerous ‘equity brokers’, who juggled different cryptocurrencies for maximum profit. Bloomberg also reported that most Google searches for laundering money in that period were made from Gujarat, and Indians were willing to pay up to 25% more for Bitcoin.
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