Enforcement Directorate Raids Five Crypto On-Ramps Over USDT Remittance Scheme

Published by James Harris on June 20, 2026June 20, 2026

India’s Enforcement Directorate raided six premises across Bengaluru this week, targeting five crypto payment firms it says were running unauthorized cross-border money transfer operations through stablecoin pipelines, freezing roughly 6 crore rupees in suspected bank accounts. The pattern alleged across all five platforms is nearly identical: rupees deposited, USDT purchased, sent offshore, sold over the counter, cash paid out on the other end with no purpose codes, no Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates, and none of the paperwork FEMA requires.

The mechanism the ED describes is not novel. Using stablecoins, particularly USDT, to route money around formal remittance infrastructure has been documented across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America for years. What makes the Indian case structurally different is that the firms named here, Transak, Carret, Mokshagna, Onramp.money, and Onmeta, are regulated-adjacent businesses, not anonymous wallets. They operate as fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, which means they sit precisely at the interface the Indian government has been trying to monitor since it brought virtual asset service providers under AML law in 2023. Targeting that interface is consistent with how Indian enforcement has worked historically: find the rupee-to-crypto conversion point and apply pressure there, because everything upstream and downstream is harder to reach.

India still has no dedicated licensing regime for these firms, which means they have been operating in a gap between tax rules and AML obligations with no clear compliance pathway to follow.

The raids land alongside two other ED actions filed within the same week: an arrest tied to a 500-crore Ponzi scheme around a token called Korvio Coin with over 248,000 alleged victims, and a prosecution complaint connected to a Coinbase phishing operation run by an Indian national already imprisoned in the United States. Three separate enforcement actions in a week signals a coordinated posture shift, not routine activity. For the broader fiat on-ramp sector operating in India, the practical implication is that informal cross-border flows, even those dressed in compliance-adjacent language, are now clearly in scope. Firms that have relied on regulatory ambiguity to offer remittance-like products through crypto rails should read this week as the end of that ambiguity, regardless of whether formal licensing rules exist yet.

The ED’s specific accusation against Transak, that it converted Indian profits into crypto and transferred them to a U.S. affiliate to avoid normal banking channels, is the most consequential allegation in the set. If that framing holds, it extends the enforcement logic from informal remittance services to intercompany treasury operations, a much wider category of cross-border crypto activity.