Gujarat police have traced roughly Rs 634 crore in public deposits to two mobile applications, SD Pay and Apna Pay, and have arrested six men in a case registered at the Amreli cyber crime police station. Investigators put the number of depositors at more than 1.5 lakh, spread across Saurashtra, north Gujarat and the state’s larger cities.
A pitch that fitted in a WhatsApp forward
The offer was easy to repeat and hard to resist. Put in anything from Rs 1,000 to Rs 5 lakh and collect a daily return, scaled by slab: 0.15 per cent at the bottom, rising to 0.30 per cent for deposits above Rs 5 lakh. Sitting on top of that was a referral ladder that paid between 3 per cent and 30 per cent across fifteen levels, Bombay Samachar reported.
Do the arithmetic on the top slab and the problem shows itself. A daily return of 0.30 per cent comes to about 110 per cent a year before any compounding. No bank, no manufacturer and no trading desk operating legally in India delivers that, year after year, to lakhs of small savers at once. A fifteen-layer referral chain adds the second tell: when a scheme pays you more for bringing in the next depositor than for anything the business itself produces, the money going out is the money coming in.
Police say the deposits moved through three entities set up for the purpose, S.D. Hub (OPC) Private Limited, Shiv Dharti Communication and Upay Digi Payment India, using around 15 corporate bank accounts alongside dozens of personal ones. SD Pay had crossed ten lakh downloads on the Play Store, according to The420.in. Those arrested are Suryasinh Rathod (24) of Gandhinagar, Ashish Gedia (38) and Bhavesh Chauhan (41) of Surat, and Nishi Prasad (47), Sohil Makwana (26) and Niravkumar Patel (32) of Mehsana. The case invokes the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita along with deposit-protection and information technology laws.
Why the same story keeps repeating in Gujarat
App-based deposit schemes have found unusually fertile ground here, and not by accident. Trading towns in Saurashtra and north Gujarat hold a lot of savings outside the formal market, and a chunk of it sits with families who invest on the word of someone they know rather than on a prospectus. A listing on the Play Store supplies the missing credential. Reports say the promoters also ran seminars in hotel banquet halls in Mehsana, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Vadodara, borrowing the staging of a genuine fintech launch.
The pattern has a short local history. Gujarat’s traders were still working through the collapse of a large retail chain earlier this month when this case surfaced, and the state’s cyber cell has spent much of 2026 on investment-fraud complaints. The Gujarat Protection of Interest of Depositors Act exists for exactly this situation, and it lets the state attach the assets of a defaulting establishment. Using it early is what separates a recovery of paise in the rupee from a recovery of nothing.
What depositors can do now
Anyone who put money into either app should file on the national cybercrime portal or the 1930 helpline rather than waiting for the Amreli investigation to reach them, because a filed complaint is what links a bank account to a claim. That link is already doing work in this case: investigators found 83 complaints from outside Gujarat against 12 of the accounts they were tracing, which suggests the money did not stay in the state.
Expect the recovery timeline to be measured in years, not months. What is worth watching over the next few weeks is narrower. Whether the special investigation team names promoters above the six men arrested so far. Whether the state moves to attach property under the depositors Act instead of leaving recovery to the criminal trial. And whether anyone examines how an app taking public deposits at 110 per cent a year kept a payment channel and a Play Store listing for as long as it did.
Sources: Bombay Samachar, The420.in, Loktej
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.