Rashesh Bharatkumar Upadhyay: ED arrest in digital-arrest case

The Enforcement Directorate has arrested Mumbai advocate Rashesh Bharatkumar Upadhyay, also known as Rashesh Shah, in a money-laundering investigation originating from a Goa digital-arrest complaint involving about Rs 2.6 crore. In a press release dated 26 October 2026, the ED said he allegedly arranged bribes to secure the release of frozen bank accounts used by a nationwide cyber-fraud network.

The ED’s Panaji Zonal Office arrested Upadhyay on 24 October 2026 under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA). According to the agency, the Special Court (PMLA), North Goa, remanded him to ED custody until 29 October 2026. He is the seventh person arrested in the investigation.

The agency said Upadhyay was intercepted at a boarding gate at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport before an early-morning connecting flight to Delhi. Mumbai Customs and the Central Industrial Security Force assisted the interception, the ED said. The agency characterised the journey as an attempt to flee and said he had no return booking.

The arrest adds an alleged account-unfreezing operation to an investigation that began with impersonation of public officials. The ED’s allegations against Upadhyay concern restoring access to money after law-enforcement agencies had frozen accounts following cyber-fraud complaints.

The Goa complaint behind the investigation

According to the ED’s 26 October release, fraudsters impersonated officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Central Bureau of Investigation. They allegedly kept a Goa resident and her husband under continuous video surveillance, showed her a forged Supreme Court order and coerced her into transferring about Rs 2.6 crore.

The recipients’ accounts were falsely described as “Secret Supervision Accounts”, the ED said. Its account identifies TRAI and the CBI as bodies whose identities were impersonated, not as participants in the alleged fraud. The purported Supreme Court order was also part of the deception described by the agency.

Moneycontrol, reporting the ED’s earlier investigation, identified the originating police case as FIR No. 17/2025, registered on 9 June 2025 at the Cyber Crime Police Station, North Goa. An FIR, or first information report, is the police record that initiates a criminal investigation.

According to Moneycontrol’s account of the investigation, the woman allegedly transferred Rs 2,60,33,634 between 21 May and 2 June 2025. Those alleged transfers and the subsequent police complaint are the older events underlying the arrest announced in October.

The ED said it traced the proceeds through more than 400 mule accounts, used to receive and move money, into a network of commodity, travel and foreign-exchange companies. It alleged that Fahim Moin Hussain Sayed and Naim Mueen Sayyed controlled those companies through dummy directors: people formally listed as directors rather than exercising actual control.

What the ED alleges about frozen accounts

The ED alleged that Upadhyay intervened whenever law-enforcement agencies froze the network’s bank accounts following cyber-fraud complaints. According to its release, he fixed bribe amounts, collection points and onward payments to suspected officials through angadiyas.

Mint described angadiyas as private cash intermediaries in its reporting on the case. The ED said its investigation was continuing to identify the officials who allegedly received payments and the intermediaries involved.

According to the ED, Upadhyay admitted arranging the unfreezing of about 100 accounts for various agents, with one instance involving a payment exceeding Rs 60 lakh. This is the agency’s account of an alleged admission, not a judicial finding.

The agency further alleged that the dealings continued after its searches, including in relation to accounts it had frozen. It accused Upadhyay of deleting chats with co-accused and switching off all his known mobile numbers before the airport interception.

The ED also disputed whether his work for the network amounted to legal representation. It said he had neither appeared nor filed a vakalatnama for the co-accused or their companies. A vakalatnama is the document authorising a lawyer to represent a client, as Mint explained in its report.

The release argued that protection for lawyer-client communications did not extend to communications furthering an illegal purpose or revealing crime or fraud. That is the ED’s stated position; the release does not set out a court ruling on that issue or Upadhyay’s response to the allegations.

Transaction totals are not the reported victim losses

The ED’s latest release said the company network undertook nearly Rs 28,000 crore in banking transactions and deposited about Rs 2,900 crore in cash. It separately said its bank accounts appeared in more than 300 victim complaints and over 160 FIRs across 20 states and Union Territories, involving reported losses exceeding Rs 400 crore.

These figures describe different measures. The ED presented the nearly Rs 28,000 crore figure as banking activity, not as the amount lost by the Goa complainant or the aggregate reported victim losses.

Earlier reporting by Moneycontrol attributed to the ED an alleged process in which bank credits were converted into cash and then foreign currency through companies holding Reserve Bank of India money-changing licences.

Moneycontrol reported that Sayed and Sayyed were arrested on 23 August 2026. The Free Press Journal subsequently reported the arrests of chartered accountant Bhushan Suryakant Moye, Vilas Narayan Pawar and Shailesh Dagdu Chavan on 27 August 2026, citing alleged roles in managing companies and moving funds.

The ED’s 26 October release said six people had been arrested before Upadhyay, including the two alleged network controllers and agents involved in banking entries and account releases. It said further investigation would seek to identify the alleged bribe recipients, angadiyas and other intermediaries, and trace the full extent of the proceeds of crime.