The Odisha Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has caught up with the mastermind behind a massive ₹40-crore trading scam that left hundreds of investors in the lurch. The suspect, Amit Mandal, was picked up from his home in the Bankura district of West Bengal on December 31. After being presented before a local court there, he was brought to Odisha on Friday to face charges in a case that appears to involve over a hundred crores in illicit transactions.
The investigation kicked off just a few days ago, on December 29, after a Khurda resident named Sushant Kumar Das filed a formal complaint. Das told officials that Mandal and his associates lured him into a share trading scheme with the promise of lucrative monthly returns— somewhere between 3.5 and 7 per cent. Trusting the pitch, Das invested roughly ₹8.5 lakh between 2022 and 2024, only to see the payouts dry up.
According to the EOW, Das was far from the only victim. Mandal allegedly targeted around 500 people in Odisha and another 100 in West Bengal, collecting a staggering ₹120 crore over a four-year period. To build trust, he initially paid out the promised returns, but the system collapsed in 2023. When investors started asking questions, Mandal reportedly fed them stories about reinvesting their money into a new company before eventually going off the grid.
The scale of the fraud became clearer when investigators began digging into Mandal’s personal finances. He was reportedly using his own bank accounts to collect deposits, and a look into just one of those accounts revealed a turnover of ₹122 crore. While the police have accounted for much of the money, over ₹40 crore remains missing. With Mandal now in custody, the EOW is currently verifying his other accounts to see if any more of the investors' funds can be recovered.
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