NEW DELHI: Investigating a trail of more than Rs 331 crore deposited in a bank account over eight months in an illegal betting app-linked money-laundering case, ED officials landed at the doors of a bike-taxi driver working with a well-known cab aggregator to earn two square meals a day.
The stunned investigators lost no time to detect that this was a classic case of a “mule” account being used to pump dirty money.
Officials said that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) stumbled upon the Rapido bike driver while investigating the 1xbet online betting-linked money-laundering case.
A response from Rapido on the development is awaited.
It was found that the driver’s bank account received deposits worth Rs 331.36 crore between August 19, 2024, and April 16, 2025, the officials said.
Alarmed by the ‘suspicious’ multi-crore-rupee transactions in a short period of eight months, the federal agency conducted a raid at the address provided in the driver’s bank records.
The sleuths found out that the driver lived in a two-room shanty in a modest Delhi locality and remained out of his house the entire day as he drove his bike to eke out a living.
What further attracted the ED’s gaze was that a sum of more than Rs 1 crore, out of the over Rs 331 crore deposits, was used to pay the expenses of a “grand destination wedding” at a plush hotel in Rajasthan’s lake city of Udaipur.
According to the officials, the wedding is linked to a young politician from Gujarat who could be summoned for questioning soon.
The driver is understood to have told the ED investigators during his questioning that he neither knew anything about the bank transactions nor could he identify the bride, groom or their families whose wedding event in Udaipur was “funded” through his account.
The ED suspects that the driver’s bank account was a “mule” platform.
A mule account is used to funnel illicit funds generated from financial crimes and the actual owner is not its user. Such accounts are created using fake or hired KYC, where someone lends their account in lieu of a commission.
The ED found that the account received “large” deposits from multiple unidentified sources and these were “swiftly” re-routed to other suspicious accounts.
One of the sources of the funds sent into this bank account is linked with illegal betting, the officials said.
The agency is now verifying more sources and destinations of the transactions that took place in this account.
The agency had recently attached assets worth crores of rupees of former cricketers Shikhar Dhawan and Suresh Raina as part of the 1xbet probe, even as it questioned a number of other cricketers and celebrities.