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 ₹300 crore and ₹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 ₹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 ₹1 crore — has since grown considerably. Eight more victims came forward soon after, pushing the figure to ₹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 are currently in police remand until July 13 and are being questioned in detail. Investigators, he said, are now recording statements and collecting documents from everyone who claims to have invested and lost money — an exercise aimed squarely at establishing just how big this network really was.
An Alleged Political Connection
As the probe widened, so did the questions — particularly around Yogesh Dhamecha’s political background. It emerged that he has served as the BJP’s organisation secretary in Bhavnagar for the past two years, and according to a local social worker, has been associated with the party for close to 15 years, with links reaching senior leaders within the organisation.
Asked directly whether Yogesh held any formal position within the BJP, PSI Vadhera was measured in his response, saying the investigation so far had found no verified evidence to confirm the claim. He urged anyone who believes they were cheated to come forward with documents and evidence so the case against the accused could be strengthened.
Who Are the Accused?
What makes this case unusual is how ordinary the two men’s backgrounds sound. Sanjay Dhamecha, 43, studied up to Class 12, trained as an electrician at an ITI, and worked as a driver. His family says he’s married with a son and a daughter, and that his father is a retired schoolteacher. CCTV cameras have since gone up at his home. His relatives insist they had no idea he was running any kind of investment business — they’d assumed his frequent trips and meetings were tied to community or organisational work.
Yogesh, believed to be around 28-30, studied only up to Class 3. He lives with his mother and three brothers, is married, and has two children. His mother put it plainly: she works as a labourer, leaves home early, returns in the evening, and has no idea what her son does for a living — beyond knowing that he “does 20%-20%,” a reference, investigators believe, to the guaranteed returns he promised his investors.
It’s this gap — between the modest, almost unremarkable lives the two cousins appeared to lead, and the hundreds of crores now allegedly tied to their names — that has left even their own families struggling to make sense of it.
“I Invested With Trust. Today I Have Been Betrayed.”
That gap shows up just as starkly among the people who trusted them. Nowhere is the human cost of the alleged scheme clearer than in the accounts of the agents who helped bring in investors on the cousins’ behalf. Raghubhai Vaghela, one such agent, said he currently has 20-25 people investing under him, and that both Sanjay and Yogesh had personally guaranteed him a 20% return, backed by a stamp paper document from Sanjay.
Close to ₹56.7 lakh is tied up in his account alone, Raghubhai said — money that belongs largely to small, poor investors who trusted him. He lost his own savings too: ₹7-8 lakh he’d set aside to finish building his house. “The house still leaks,” he said, “and when my money sank, so did my belief that it would ever be finished.”
By his estimate, more than 150 agents like him were working across the network, most of them locals who trusted Sanjay simply because he was one of their own. Now, Raghubhai says, he intends to use that same position to fight for the return of investors’ money — calling himself the voice of the “small, poor and exploited” people who were pulled into the scheme.
A Scam Spread Across 35 Villages
That local trust, agents like Raghubhai suggest, is exactly what let the scheme travel so far. Balvant Boricha, a social worker from Fariyaadka who says he’d heard about the scheme informally for over a year, estimates it ran for nearly two-and-a-half years and pulled in investors from 30-35 villages, with thousands believed to have suffered losses. He puts the true size of the scam at ₹300-350 crore, while victims from villages including Bhavnagar, Avania, Budhel, Sodvadara, Sidsar and Vartej place it at over ₹400 crore.
Boricha’s account of how the scheme spread is telling: in the early days, Sanjay would reportedly meet investors in person, framing the pitch almost like a favour between friends — this is how I run my business, if you’re interested, invest. It’s precisely this kind of quiet, personal trust, Boricha points out, combined with the everyday pressure of inflation and the hope of a little extra income, that made so many people vulnerable to the offer.
He’s also called for investigators to look closely at the five to ten people who reportedly stayed close to Sanjay at all times, managing his accounts, travel and day-to-day transactions — arguing that the full picture of the fraud won’t emerge until their role is examined too.
What Happens Next
With both accused now in police remand and the number of complainants climbing by the day, the Crime Branch’s immediate task is to establish just how large this network really was — and how much of investors’ money can realistically be traced and recovered. For now, the case stands as a stark reminder of how easily trust, especially the kind built on community and personal familiarity, can be turned into a tool for large-scale fraud.
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