New Delhi, Dec 13: The Income Tax Department Wednesday conducted survey operations at major bitcoin exchanges across the country on suspicion of alleged tax evasion and detected several lakh entries of high-networth individuals (HNIs) in their databases, official sources said.
The operations that began early morning at nine major exchanges in Delhi, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kochi were on till last reports came in.
Sources said the taxman has deployed an heavy assortment of software cloning and ‘mirror imaging’ devices to drain out “complete details” of emails, addresses and correspondence ids of the investors and players from the computers.
They said that the sleuths detected a number of high-networth individuals (HNIs) and customer ids in these databases and prima facie about 20-25 lakh such entities have been traced.
Entries of HNIs suggest that they were trading on these exchanges. (PTI)