The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha police on Thursday arrested a social media influencer in connection with the Rs 1,000 crore crypto-ponzi scam. With this, the number of arrests in the unmasked scam has gone up to three.

Ratnakar Palai, an M. Tech in IT from Karnataka University, Bangalore, claims to be an international speaker, entrepreneur and investment guru. He was a close accomplice to Gurtej singh and Nirod Das earlier arrested in this scam. He was arrested from Bubaneswar and is being remanded to judicial custody, EOW said.

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Palai used to run a YouTube channel for wider publicity of the scheme. He is also the member of some other such dubious scams too which is under scrutiny. He also runs an institute namely ‘Learn to earn”, the investigating agency said.

The EOW is currently interrogating Singh and Das to ascertain their suspected link with Canada and Dubai based non-resident Indians. It will look into the money trail, siphoning of money, benami transactions, money laundering besides the network in other countries.

STA (Solar Techno Alliance) was launched in September 2021. In its website and social media accounts it claims to be a one-stop solar technologies service that enables users to order anything they like from the nearest farmers in the shortest amount of time using block chain technology.

During the inquiry, it was found that STA through some up-line members are very active in these districts and they have been using various propaganda tools to persuade people to join in this scheme and earn huge money in a very short time.

It was found that members have started using the STA token as a legal tender in their day-to-day business. It is estimated that more than 10000 people from Odisha have already been members of this scheme. This scheme has more than 2 lakh members in India \including states like Punjab, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Assam.