The operators behind GainBitcoin are Indian brothers Amit Bhardwaj and Ajay Bhardwaj. The project is affiliated with the Singapore company Variabletech PTE.Ltd and officially launched in 2015.
Involved amount: Initially, it was reported that over $300 million was involved, but after further investigation by the Indian police, it was confirmed that the actual amount involved reached as high as $13.7 billion (approximately 960 billion Indian Rupees). In 2025, the police seized $2.75 million in implicated crypto assets, but there are still substantial assets unaccounted for.
Its core scheme is a combination of the “cloud mining” gimmick layered with a Ponzi scheme model that offers returns through multi-level marketing. The project is packaged as a low-threshold, high-return cloud mining platform, claiming that users do not need to purchase expensive mining machines or bear operational costs, but can simply deposit funds to obtain stable and high static mining returns. With the promotional gimmick of “earning Bitcoin while lying down,” it attracted a large number of retail investors seeking stable returns globally in a short time.
At the same time, the project team meticulously designed a multi-level marketing incentive mechanism to encourage existing investors to develop downlines. For every deposit made by downline investors, the uplines earn commission rewards based on their levels, thus rapidly expanding the scale of the funding pool. However, in reality, the project did not have any real mining equipment or mining operations. All returns paid to early investors came from the principal of new investors entering the scheme.
As new funds gradually dried up, the funding pool became unsustainable, and in 2019, the project completely collapsed, with the operators fleeing overseas with the funds. Among them, the main perpetrator Amit Bhardwaj passed away in 2022, resulting in increased difficulty in the follow-up investigation of the case. To this day, a large amount of principal from numerous investors remains unrecoverable, leaving many victims worldwide with significant losses.