Wife of Rs 3,700 crore Noida ponzi scam mastermind arrested

PUNE/NOIDA: The wife of Anubhav Mittal — the alleged mastermind of one of the biggest Ponzi frauds in recent years — landed in the police net on Monday night, about 10 months after he was arrested.Ayushi, the wife of Mittal, was arrested from Undri in Pune on Monday night and taken to a local court on Tuesday. “A transit remand is being prepared. She will be brought to Noida for further probe,” Abhishek Singh, SSP of Special Task Force, Lucknow, told TOI.STF is assisting Special Investigation Team (SIT) of UP Police in the case.Ayushi is a co-accused in the case because she was a director of Ablaze Info Solutions — the company Anubhav floated to run his scheme “Social Trade” that promised returns in exchange for liking various pages. At the time of the arrest of Anubhav in February this year in Noida, the STF of UP Police had estimated the scale of the scam at Rs3,700 crore.Kondhwa police’s assistant inspector Devidas Kungar said, “The SIT reached Bengaluru to arrest Ayushi Mittal around eight days ago, but she fled and took shelter at the residence of her aunt in a housing society at Undri near Kondhwa. SIT traced her cellphone location and took help of the Kondhwa police to arrest her.”He said, “There are 288 flats in the society and we did not know in which one she was residing. We then took the list of all flat owners from the builder, but the name of Mittals did not figure in it. A grocery shop owner later tipped us about the flat Ayushi was staying in. We went there on the pretext of conducting police verification and confirmed the presence of Ayushi in the flat of one Agarwal.”Kingar said, “Ayushi was then arrested, brought to the police station and handed over to the SIT on completion of legal formalities for taking action. We have given information of her arrest to her brother, Nitin Agarwal.”Ayushi told investigators the firm was registered on September 2, 2010 at the address 878/8 New Building, SP Mukherjee Marj, Chandni Chowk. Anubhav and his father Sunil Mittal were appointed directors. “She said after her marriage to Anubhav, she was appointed as a director in the company in place of her father-in-law on March 3, 2016,” an officer said.