The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) which is a law enforcement agency in India has frozen about INR 370 crore worth of crypto assets belonging to exhchange Vauld. This enforcement body is investigating other cypto exchanges based in India.

Indian authorities freeze crypto and bank assets belonging to Vauld

Vauld is a cryptocurrency trading, borrowing, and lending platform with its Singaporean headquarters located at Flipvolt Technologies, an organisation registered in India.Vauld, which last month barred users from withdrawing, trading, and depositing on its own platform, just declared bankruptcy and is reportedly owed $363 million by creditors, according to news source The Block, which cited court records. Valar Ventures, which is backed by Peter Thiel, Pantera Capital, and Coinbase Ventures are among the investors in the firm.
The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) which is responsible for fighting economic crimes in India revealed on Friday that it had searched several Yellow Tune Technologies locations in Bangalore and had given the company an order to freeze all of its bank accounts, payment gateway accounts, and cryptocurrency balances on Flipvolt Technologies' cryptocurrency exchange, which together total 370 crore rupees ($46,439,181) in assets. 


As said by ED Vauld was utilised by 23 organisations, including non-banking financial institutions and fintech companies, to deposit 3.7 billion Indian rupees into the wallets managed by this exchange.

The agency claimed that Vauld's Indian entity has "very lax KYC norms, no EDD mechanism, no check on the depositors' sources of funds, no mechanism of raising STRs(suspicious transaction reports), etc.," which allowed the accused firms to "avoid regular banking channels" and "easily take out all the fraud money in the form of cryptocurrency"
According to ED, Vauld's India subsidiary was unable to furnish the agency with a full audit trail of Yellow Tune's cryptocurrency transactions and could not disclose the wallets' KYC information.
ED will not release assets until Vauld provides complete trail of transactions.