New Delhi, Aug 13 : A day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) froze Vauld’s cryptocurrency lending platform’s bank assets worth 370 crore due to its “predatory lending practices” Vauld on Saturday called the move “unfortunate”.The ED had conducted searches in various locations of Yellow Tune Technologies Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru and also frozen assets belonging to the Flipvolt cryptocurrency exchange that runs the Darshan Bathija-run Vauld.
Vauld, which had last month was able to suspend all withdrawals or deposits, trading or withdrawals on its platform due to “financial difficulties”, announced that, despite its continued cooperation “the Enforcement Directorate has passed a freezing order, based on that cryptocurrency assets in the pool wallets of the company are to be frozen to the amount of approximately 2,040 million rupees”.
“The freezing order of the Enforcement Directorate is specific to the one customer who used our services for a short duration of time, and whose account was later removed from our system.
We are respectfully dissatisfied with the freeze order,” said Vauld.
The company said that like several other players offering crypto services in India, it had received summons from the ED office in Hyderabad in July, “seeking certain information/documents”.
“In due compliance with the summons, we fully cooperated with the Enforcement Directorate and provided all the required information/documents,” said the crypto company.
The ED has stated in the statement it had made that, since the criminal investigation was launched the majority of these fintech applications have shut down and diverted huge amounts of money through this method of operation.
“While conducting fund trail investigations the ED discovered that a substantial amount of funds in the amount of Rs .370 crore was deposited by 23 entities including NBFCs that were accused and their fintech companies to the INR wallets of Yellow Tune Technologies held with cryptocurrency exchange Flipvolt Technologies Private Ltd.” it added.
These sums were nothing more than the proceeds of criminal activity resulting through predatory lending practices according to the agency.
Vauld said it follows rigorous KYC rules in every country including India.
“We seek legal advice on the best plan of course of action in order to safeguard the interests of the company, its customers and all parties involved,” it added.
This week this week, the ED blocked bank assets of cryptocurrency exchange WazirX valued at the sum of 64.67 crore.
The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has withdrawn its support for the Nischal Shetty-run cryptocurrency platform WazirX in a statement that it was eliminating the off-chain channel for fund transfer that connects WazirX and Binance.
As as many as 10 crypto exchanges were investigated by the of the ED for their suspected involvement in money laundering of about 10 billion rupees.
na/vd
