ED freezes fresh Rs 192-cr deposits of WinZO in money laundering case

NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday said it has conducted searches at the accounting firm of real money online money gaming app WinZO and has frozen fresh bank deposits, mutual funds and fixed deposits worth Rs 192 crore.

The raid at the office premises of the auditor was conducted on December 30.

During the search, the federal probe agency said in a statement, "proceeds of crime" (name for illicit funds under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act) possessed by ZO Games Pvt. Ltd. (fully owned Indian subsidiary of Winzo Pvt. Ltd.) worth around Rs 192 crore were frozen.

These funds are in the form of bank balances, fixed deposits and mutual funds, it said.

In November, the agency had arrested the founders of WinZO -- Saumya Singh Rathore and Paavan Nanda following their questioning at the Bengaluru zonal office of the ED.

A Bengaluru court granted bail to Rathore a few days ago while a similar relief was denied to Nanda.

The ED had conducted the first round of raids in this case in November and had then said that bonds, fixed deposits and mutual funds worth about Rs 505 crore "possessed" by WinZO Games were frozen by it.

Reacting to these charges then, a spokesperson for WinZO had said in a statement that "Fairness and transparency are core to how WinZO designs and operates its platform."

The ED has alleged that the company was engaged in "criminal" activities and "unscrupulous" practices as customers were made to play with bots, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms and software named 'PPP, EP and Persona' and not humans, without being informed so.

"Winzo has also prevented/limited withdrawals of monies held by the customers in the wallets of Winzo Pvt Ltd. and it generated proceeds of crime in the form of 'Rake Commission' from the matches played by the bots with the real players on the Winzo app.

"In this manner, the company made winnings of around Rs177 crore from the bots between May 2024 to August 2025," according to the ED.

It added that funds of Rs 557 crore were similarly generated between April 2022 and December 2023.

The company, the agency alleged, was in possession of users' monies worth Rs 43 crore, even after the ban on real money online gaming by the Union government (in late 2024).

The ED had quantified the total proceeds of crime in this case at about Rs 802 crore.

A part of these alleged illicit funds, according to the ED, has been taken out of India to the US and Singapore "under the garb of overseas investments".

Funds worth USD 54 million have been parked in their bank account in the US (bank account held in the name of WINZO US Inc.), which is a "shell" company since all the operations and day-to-day business activities, operation of bank accounts is done from India, the ED claimed.