CoinDCX co-founders Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal were taken into police custody on March 21 over a fraud complaint tied entirely to a fake impersonation website. Nine days later, they announced a ₹100 crore fund to overhaul how India fights digital financial fraud.
The Thane court granted bail on March 24, finding no prima facie case against them. The fraud originated from a counterfeit site, “coindcx.pro,” operated by impersonators with no link whatsoever to the real CoinDCX platform. No funds moved through the exchange. No transaction took place on it.
Arrest That Changed Everything
As Sumit Gupta wrote on X, the complainant himself told the court he had never met the founders and did not know them. The case collapsed on its own facts. But what it exposed about India’s current cyber fraud response infrastructure was harder to ignore.
“I’ll be honest: our experience was deeply unsettling. Not because we doubted the facts. But because it made something painfully clear: the ecosystem we operate in doesn’t yet have the tools to tell the difference between the people building this industry responsibly and the people exploiting it.”
According to Sumit Gupta, on X, the situation set a dangerous precedent. If a scammer uses a founder’s name, brand, or face in a fake website and defrauds someone, the founder can be arrested. Not the scammer. The founder.
That framing drove CoinDCX’s response.
The ₹100 Crore Commitment
The Digital Suraksha Network is not positioned as a product launch or a PR exercise. CoinDCX calls it infrastructure, the kind India’s digital finance space needs but does not yet have. And they are clear: this is not only a crypto problem. Any company with a digital footprint faces the same exposure.
India filed 28.15 lakh cybercrime complaints in 2025. A 24% jump from the year before. Total financial losses: ₹22,495 crore, with investment scams accounting for 76% of that figure. Of those 28 lakh complaints, only 55,484 became FIRs, a conversion rate under 2%.
The numbers get sharper. Nearly half of Indian adults have either experienced or know someone who fell victim to an AI voice-cloning or deepfake scam, nearly double the global average. 83 percent of those victims suffered direct monetary loss.
Four Pillars of the Network
The DSN fund is structured around four areas. First is consumer education. CoinDCX plans to build a multilingual “Caution Before Transaction” initiative covering over 100 million crypto users, most of whom have never been told how to verify whether a platform is regulated or real. A 24/7 WhatsApp helpline will be free and open to all Indians, not only CoinDCX users, allowing anyone to verify links, platforms, or offers before sending money.
The second pillar is an Open Fraud Intelligence API. In 21 months, CoinDCX documented over 1,200 fraudulent websites impersonating their platform. That data had stayed internal. Now it goes public. Every crypto exchange, bank, fintech, and digital lender is being invited to contribute to a shared real-time fraud database.
Law enforcement infrastructure comes third. Most police stations in India are not equipped to investigate digital financial fraud at the pace it moves. The DSN will fund blockchain forensics training for state cybercrime cells, a rapid-response technical unit for active fraud cases, and technology grants for Cyber Crime Coordination Centres.
The fourth pillar calls on regulators directly. CoinDCX is asking SEBI, FIU-IND, and the Ministry of Finance to work with the industry on shared cyber safety standards. The network will also commission independent research and publish quarterly “State of Digital Trust” reports.
The Fraud Scale Behind the Decision
India’s UPI processed 21.7 billion transactions worth ₹28.33 lakh crore in January 2026 alone. Every one is a potential attack surface. Deepfake fraud attempts globally spiked 3,000% in 2023. Files of that type surged from 500,000 in 2023 to a projected 80 lakh by 2025.
CoinDCX has already been working with the Enforcement Directorate on seized digital asset custody, co-launched a Cyber Surakshit Goem campaign with Goa Police, and supported training at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy. The DSN builds directly on that track record.
Gupta and Khandelwal closed their statement with a pointed ask. They are calling on every platform, every regulator, and every Indian in digital finance to join. Someone has to build this first. They put ₹100 crore behind the argument that it should start now.
Key Takeaways:
- CoinDCX co-founders were arrested March 21 and granted bail March 24 after a fake site fraud complaint.
- India recorded 28.15 lakh cybercrime complaints in 2025, with ₹22,495 crore in total financial losses.
- CoinDCX pledges ₹100 crore for a shared fraud intelligence API, law enforcement training, and a 24/7 helpline.
