The Enforcement Directorate traced an illegal betting racket to a lavish destination wedding in Rajasthan this week — revealing a convoluted Rs 331 crore scam. The money was traced to the bank account of a Rapido driver who remained wholly unaware that he was “spending” a massive sum of money on the nuptials of two strangers. A whopping Rs 331.36 crore was deposited between August 2024 and April 2025 before being swiftly re-routed to other suspicious accounts.
According to reports, the wedding took place at the Taj Aravalli Resort in November last year and utilised more than Rs 1 crore from the ‘mule’ account. The lavish ceremony was reportedly connected to Gujarat youth political figure Aditya Zula. Little is publicly known about the bride and groom or the attendees at their wedding.
Mule account?
Officials told PTI that the probe agency had stumbled upon the Rapido bike driver while investigating the 1xbet online betting-linked money-laundering case. The investigators had realised after his doors that the bike-taxi driver was not directly involved in criminal dealings. Rather this was a a classic case of a “mule” account being used to pump dirty money.
The federal agency had led a raid at the address provided in the bank records after becoming concerned by the “suspicious” multi-crore-rupee transactions in a short period of eight months. But the sleuths found out that the driver lived in a two-room shanty in a modest Delhi locality and remained out of his house the entire day as he drove his bike to earn a living.
‘Sponsoring’ a destination wedding
What further attracted the ED’s gaze was that a sum of more than Rs 1 crore, out of the over Rs 331 crore deposits, was used to pay the expenses of a “grand destination wedding” at a plush hotel in Rajasthan’s lake city of Udaipur. According to the officials, the wedding is linked to a young politician from Gujarat who could be summoned for questioning soon. The driver is understood to have told the ED investigators during his questioning that he neither knew anything about the bank transactions nor could he identify the bride, groom or their families whose wedding event in Udaipur was “funded” through his account.
(With inputs from agencies)
