It was a brazen plot straight out of a thriller: after a businessman managed to reclaim some of his lost Bitcoin fortune from the collapsed BitConnect scheme, a group of corrupt officials saw an opportunity.
In 2018, a former BJP MLA and eleven police officers—including a district superintendent—orchestrated the kidnapping of Shailesh Bhatt to seize his crypto.
They held him at a farm and demanded his digital assets. Their scheme has now culminated in a life sentence for all fourteen conspirators, a stark warning about power, corruption, and the new frontier of digital crime.
