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Two cousins. One village. And a promise that seemed too good to walk away from – 20% guaranteed returns on stock market investments. That promise is now at the centre of what victims allege is one of Saurashtra’s biggest Ponzi scams in recent memory, with losses estimated between Rs 300 crore and Rs 400 crore, and nearly a hundred people from over 30 villages coming forward to say they were cheated.

Local reports suggest it didn’t start out looking this big. The case began with a handful of complaints from Fariyaadka, a village near Bhavnagar, where six people said they’d been cheated of Rs 93 lakh by Yogesh Dhamecha and Sanjay Dhamecha – cousins from the same village who allegedly sold the same pitch to hundreds of others. Investigators say the two ran the operation the way most Ponzi schemes work: using money from new investors to pay off the returns promised to earlier ones, just long enough to build trust and let word-of-mouth do the rest. By the time that trust cracked, the two had allegedly collected crores – and gone missing for close to two months.

From seven complaints to a hundred

What the Local Crime Branch (LCB) first logged as a modest fraud complaint – seven investors, a little over Rs 1 crore – has since grown considerably. Eight more victims came forward soon after, pushing the figure to Rs 1.29 crore. But that was only the beginning: as the investigation gathered pace, close to a hundred victims approached the Crime Branch, many of them insisting the real scale of the fraud runs far higher than what’s officially on record.

According to local reports, LCB PSI R.A. Vadhera confirmed that both cousins........

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