QNet scammers sentenced to 10 years in prison in India
Three QNet scammers have each been sentenced to ten years in prison.
Sentencing, which included 100,000 INR fines, followed guilty convictions in an Andhra Pradesh court.
As reported by The Times of India on March 31st, Augustine Joseph, R Kamakshi Ranganathan, and Pushpam Appala Naidu were directors of M/S Quest Net Enterprises India Pvt Ltd, Chennai.
QNet launched as QuestNet in 1998 and soon spread across India. The MLM pyramid scheme is run out of Malaysia by Vijay Eswaran (right).
Following registration of criminal cases in 2008, Joseph, Ranganathan, Naidu were charged with cheating, criminal conspiracy, and violations of the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act in 2016.
QNet, which still operates in India illegally as Vihaan Direct Selling Ltd., has a long history of fraud in India.
As documented in BehindMLM’s 2017 QNet review;
- in 2013 the EOW froze several bank accounts tied to QNet;
- in 2014 the EOW secured an order prohibiting Vihaan Direct Selling from operating in India;
- in 2016 the Delhi EOW registered its first criminal compliant against QNet and Vihaan Direct Selling;
- Vihaan Direct Selling India majority shareholder Michael Ferreira was arrested in 2016; and
- QNet founder Vijay Eswaran, a Malaysian national, is wanted by Indian authorities
Since then;
- seventy victims protested lack of regulatory action against QNet in Bengaluru (2018);
- an Indian QNet victim committed suicide after losing $28,900 (2019);
- an investigation into commissions owed to 200,000 QNet promoters revealed government corruption and a national security threat (2019);
- over 500 individuals, among them Indian celebrities, were summoned by the Cyberabad EOW to explain their public QNet endorsements (2019);
- QNet’s Vihaan Direct Selling India operations were shut down by the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs (2019);
- three QNet promoters were arrested by the Odisha EOW (2019);
- $11 million tied to QNet’s money laundering operations in India was frozen in January 2023;
- $16 million tied to QNet was frozen as part of a Hyderabad criminal case in March 2023;
- three QNet executives were arrested in Hyderabad in May 2023;
- eighteen QNet scammers were arrested in Jaipur in October 2023;
- the Manipur QNet Victim’s Welfare Association called on Indian authorities to take action against QNet in October 2023; and
- a new QNet criminal case was opened in Indore in September 2024
- India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a QNet fraud warning in December 2024
- 32 QNet promoters were arrested in Hyderabad in March 2026
Government corruption aside, despite the above Indian authorities seem unable to rid the country of QNet once and for all.
As of February 2026, SimilarWeb was tracking ~153,000 monthly visits to QNet’s website.
Top sources of QNet website traffic over the same period were India (21%), Thailand (14%) and the US (5%).
