Enforcement Directorate (ED) was conducting searches on certain premises fintech firms Paytm and PayU, according to media reports.
Recently, the federal agency had conducted raids at Bengaluru premises of Razorpay, Paytm, and Cashfree Payments.
The ED had carried out search operations at six different locations in Bengaluru in connection with its probe into the Chinese loan apps fraud case. The financial probe agency raided the premises associated with Paytm, Razorpay and Cashfree, all payment gateways which allegedly facilitated transactions on loan apps unauthorisedly run by Chinese-owned firms.
After the search operations, Paytm had said that as a part of ongoing investiga-tions on a specific set of merchants, “the ED has sought information regarding such merchants to whom we provide payment processing solutions”.
“It is hereby clarified that these merchants are independent entities, and none of them are our group entities. We are, and will continue to, fully cooperate with the authorities, and all the directive actions are being duly complied with,” said the company. Paytm further said that that the “ED has instructed us to freeze certain amounts from the Merchant IDs (MIDs) of a specific set of merchant entities”.
In a statement, One 97 Communications Ltd, which is the parent company of Paytm, clarified that none of the funds which have been instructed to be frozen belong to Paytm or any of its group companies.
The federal probe agency informed that it seized Rs 17 crore worth of funds kept in “merchant IDs and bank accounts of these Chinese persons-controlled entities” during the raids.
The modus operandi of these entities is that they use forged documents of Indians and make them dummy directors, leading to the generation of “proceeds of crime”, the agency had alleged.
