Authorities in Navi, Mumbai continue to investigate OneCoin, following the arrest of eighteen affiliates last Sunday.

The latest has seen police book four more OneCoin affiliates, who they believe hold “senior positions in OneCoin”.

Interrogation of the previously arrested eighteen affiliates meanwhile has revealed insight into OneCoin’s local Indian operations.

Following the payment, investors were given passwords to access their profiles on the OneCoin website.

On the website, investors could see how many coins they had purchased with their money.

From the sounds of it, local OneCoin scammers were creating accounts for those that invested. They’d then transfer OneCoins from their own accounts.

This effectively allows them to cash out their OneCoin balances, seeing as OneCoin itself suspended withdrawals back in January.

The accused had told the investors that the value of the coins would fluctuate according to the value of Euro.

Investors were also made to believe that the value of the coins would steadily increase as more and more people joined the multi-level marketing scheme.

That way, each investor would bring in their acquaintances into the scheme believing this would increase their returns.

In December 2018, said the police, the investors were to receive their payout. Until then, the accused told the investors to wait and watch their investment grow steadily on the website.

In contrast to authorities in Europe adopting a “wait and see” approach (eg. Finland), Indian authorities have been quick to identify OneCoin as a Ponzi scheme and take action.

Had we not acted now, there would have been a flood of complaints next year after the investors would have realised that they had been cheated,” said (an) officer.

On the money side of things, OneCoin operated in India much the same as anywhere else – through a bunch of shell companies and bank accounts.

The money they had collected so far was funneled into bank accounts not registered under OneCoin.

We have found four bank accounts registered under the names of other corporations.

The accounts contain large amount of money and we are in the process of freezing them, said an officer.

As the investigation continues, I expect we’ll soon learn the total number of Indian OneCoin victims, losses and balance of seized funds.

In the aftermath of the crackdown, prominent OneCoin investor Tom “Mmkay” McMurrain has cancelled his Indian promotional events.

McMurrain was scheduled to promote OneCoin in the Indian cities of Delhi, Bangalore and Coimbotore from April 28th.

Prior to the arrests on Sunday the corresponding Bizzabo event pages were publicly accessible. They’ve since all been pulled offline.