Socialite Crypto Scams $50 Million: Hanging Out at Casinos and Parties, Could Face 24 Years in Prison

Author | Meghna Bali, Benjamin Sveen

Translator | Nuka-Cola

"No one can resist such temptation."

A cricket lover and frequenter of the high-end rich world - that's how Sydney-based Indian socialite Harpreet Singh Sahni is described. Friends often see the 45-year-old rubbing shoulders with politicians such as Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard and Mike Baird, asking them when preselection will start.

After 12 years of hard work in Australia, Sahni has accumulated a wealth of business experience. He owns a securities company, a real estate investment company, and also organizes concerts for Indian stars. Previously, he arranged for Punjabi star Satinder Sartaaj to perform at the Sydney Opera House.

Sahni certainly didn’t miss the global cryptocurrency boom in 2017. He began to spread the word, telling stories about how this emerging asset helped people get rich overnight.

Over the next two years, he built an international business in Australia — selling a new cryptocurrency. The project was a scam, and Sahni knew it. Indian police say he defrauded investors of nearly $50 million, half of which came from Australian victims.

Sahni, pictured in late 2018, began operating a PGUC fraud operation in Australia a few months later.

The bubble will eventually burst

In the winter of 2017, Sahni began hosting meetings at salons across Sydney to introduce the cryptocurrency. At a small gathering in Yeping, Melbourne, he said, "This is the safest investment in the world right now!" "This is the future, the future is here!"

He introduced the cryptocurrency called Plus Gold Union Coin (PGUC). Facing the enthusiastic speculators, Sahni said that this token can bring him 5,000 to 8,000 US dollars in income every day. As long as investors recruit new members, they will receive generous commissions and overseas vacation opportunities.

“No one can resist such temptation,” Sahni stressed.

He then proceeded to overwhelm the audience with details about blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining, claiming that an investor could expect to make more than $100,000 in a year by investing about $7,000 in PGUC.

In order to obtain the maximum benefits, investors must sign a 12-month freeze contract, promising not to cash out the subscribed cryptocurrency during this period. PGUC became very popular and attracted enthusiastic capital injections from investors from 22 countries within a few months.

But token holders soon discovered problems: the PGUC website was sometimes offline for weeks at a time. Worse, investors had no way to withdraw their funds. By December 2017, cryptocurrency prices began to plummet, and users of the WhatsApp chat group finally began to suspect that they might have been scammed.

In Australia, people took their anger out on Sahni. But Sahni remained calm, telling investors that everything was under control. “Why would some people spread rumors in a group and add to the psychological pressure on others?” he said in a Zoom remote meeting in April 2018. “Don’t do such irresponsible things.”

The Ponzi scheme is still going on, madly harvesting "faith"

Sahni later admitted that within weeks of joining PGUC, he began soliciting close friends to invest. One of those close friends was a soft-spoken man named Dilip Bajaj, an influential coordinator in the Indian-Australian spiritual community.

Bajaj told ABC that he was only invited to attend the technical seminar and had no connection with Plus Gold Union Coin. "I did a lot of research and was convinced that PGUC investment was a good deal. Of course, I also conveyed this conclusion to other friends I introduced to the PGUC seminar."

Background checks revealed that Bajaj's spiritual group, the Dada Bhagwan Foundation, had also become a hotbed for Sahni to cultivate his downline. A senior member of the foundation said in an interview that nearly 150 people in the Sydney branch had invested in the PGUC project.

One of them was a 37-year-old international student named Bhavesh Patel. He recalled: "My situation was very bad at that time."

Ptael usually works in the factory, but he is in serious financial trouble after his wife suffered three heart attacks and required expensive treatment. "I have to buy medicine and injections for my wife. I also have to pay for school fees and I have to try to survive."

During a visit to his wife, a member of the Dada Bhagwan Foundation introduced him to the "good opportunity" of investing in PGUC, saying that it would definitely help him get out of trouble quickly. Patel said, "If we hadn't met in the sect, I wouldn't have trusted them at all." Patel spent a few days calculating the minimum living budget he needed to keep, and then agreed to invest about $30,000.

Another female investor, a 32-year-old business analyst, recalled how Bajaj recommended the PGUC program to her.

She had known Bajaj for 15 years and trusted his judgment. “His good deeds, whether it was charity, service to God or the welfare of the people, were well known.” She attended several PGUC seminars and thought that since Bajaj was praising the investment project, no one would question it. She and her parents invested a total of $38,000 - and that was the last time they touched the money.

Bajaj said he also lost $22,000. Bajaj pointed out, "I am also a victim of investment scam. I can only take full responsibility because I took the risk out of my own greed and was eventually swallowed up by the tempting get-rich-quick scheme."

More than a year later, many victims have given up hope of getting their money back, and several investors have filed formal reports with the New South Wales police, claiming they were maliciously defrauded.

In August 2019, new news came - Indian police arrested Harpreet Singh Sahni in a hotel in New Delhi.

The police had been monitoring Sahni's movements since a Sydney real estate agent named Rajiv Sharma filed a formal complaint against PGUC in India. According to Sharma, the police then drove Sahni nearly 1,000 kilometers to Bhopal. "I couldn't believe it. The police asked me to come to the Bhopal police station and brought him in front of me to identify him."

"I feel there is still a glimmer of hope that I may get my money back. I am really happy."

As Indian task force officials announced they had nabbed the mastermind behind a $50 million fraud, Sahni stood expressionless before the flashing cameras.

Police also explained that nearly half of the stolen money came from Australian victims, and Sahni and his accomplices spent it lavishly, including betting in casinos and attending various lavish parties.

"It was clear that they had no intention of making any investment at all. The scheme was a complete fraud from the outset," said inspector Ashok Awasthi.

“For fraud cases, it is very common to have an investigation cycle of one or two years.”

In three written confessions, Sahni admitted that three Indian men approached him in early 2017 and said they could team up to scam people by helping them invest in cryptocurrencies.

He admitted that he knew it was a fraud but continued to organize seminars to attract investors from all over Australia. Sahni mentioned in a signed statement that he could take an 8% commission from any investment. He said that he earned a total of about $540,000 worth of PGUC coins and deposited $135,000 into his account at Westpac Bank.

In March this year, the police handed over Sahni's confession to the Riverstone Police Station and filed a case against Sahni and his accomplices based on it.

Screenshots on the PGUC platform show that Sahni and his marketing network have more than 1,700 active investor accounts, all of which are his downline accounts, using their own real money to support his extravagant lifestyle.

Bhavesh Patel, a victim of the scam, said that if the same thing had affected thousands of white Australians, law enforcement would have taken action long ago. "But we are just Indians, and they are not willing to waste too much energy on us." "But if this happened to local Australians, they would definitely take it seriously."

Patel tried to seek justice at Blacktown Police Station in November last year but left in frustration.

“I filed a complaint, but the police said they couldn’t help me. They said, ‘This is a voluntary investment, they didn’t force you to invest at gunpoint, did they?’ ” When Patel tried to track down his funds, a member of Sahni’s team threatened him with violence.

In a statement, New South Wales Police said "we do not discriminate in the way we investigate crime." They stressed that while they received a large amount of evidence, much of it needed translation in order to be understood and used.

“For fraud cases, it is common for investigation cycles to take up to a year or even two years,” said Matthew Craft, head of the local police cybercrime team. “What’s more complicated is that for such cross-jurisdictional and overseas cases, the transmission and processing of information becomes more time-consuming and costly.”

Up to 24 years in prison

The fraud has also caused deep divisions within the Dada Bhagwan Foundation, with some members, including Bhavesh Patel, deciding to leave the organization altogether.

"I have completely lost faith in them. I have lost everything. As an international student, I am in a real financial difficulty. The Dada Bhagwan community should be supporting me, but they are trying to cheat me out of my money."

Harpreet Singh Sahni could face up to 24 years in prison in India. He and his co-accused will appear in a Bhopal district court on November 25 this year.