Crypto Crooks is sponsored by Chainalysis, the leading blockchain data platform.

In February of 2018, a man came to the Home Minister's office in Gandhagar,

the capital of the Indian state of Gujar with a nightmarish tale.

He had been kidnapped, he claimed, and extorted for an immense ransom,

not by thugs or criminals, but by the police.

That man was Shailash Bhatt, a successful property developer in Gujarat.

Bot claimed that officers of a local police force from Amreli, a district of Gujarat,

had captured Bott and demanded that he pay them 200

Bitcoin then worth around $1.8 million. Bot further claimed that the cops from Amrelli had acted under

orders from a shadowy mastermind connected to the most powerful political party in the state. The kidnappers probably

never expected Bott to go to the authorities because they knew that Bott himself was a kidnapper

and extortionist. The roots of this sordid little affair lead back to BitConnect, a cryptocurrency investment firm that had been launched from Gujarat in 2016.

In just two years, by combining multi-level marketing tactics pioneered by Americans and the

soaring rhetoric of new-fangled blockchain technology, BitConnect spread around the world,

raking in a staggering $2.4 billion in investments. About 293,000 of that reportedly came from Shailash Bhatt.

The problem, of course, was that BitConnect was a fraud.

In January of 2018, just weeks before Botte showed up to beg for help against corrupt police,

financial authorities around the world had begun issuing cease-and-assist orders

against the purported investment firm, claiming that it had filed false documents and hid its

real structure and operations. The orders sent BitConnect into a rapid collapse, wiping out effectively all of investors' funds.

The fallout included not just bots convoluted kidnapping, but also a suspicious suicide in Australia,

a wave of indictments in the United States, and untold suffering among tens of thousands of victims globally.

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