It started like any other Tuesday. Amit Yadav, the tech operations guy at Real11, sat with his morning chai, skimming through reports. But something didn’t sit right.
“Wait… how is this user withdrawing ₹3.5 lakh with just ₹200 in the wallet yesterday?” he muttered, eyes narrowing at his screen.
He zoomed into transaction logs. Then another account. And another.
Same pattern. Minimal deposit. Massive withdrawals.
No, this wasn’t a glitch.
This was a fraud—and a damn sophisticated one at that.
The Setup No One Saw Coming
Real11 is one of those fantasy sports platforms that has grown massively in the post-pandemic gaming boom. A cricket fan’s casino, if you will. Thousands of users. Real cash contests. Instant payouts.
And like many tech startups, they ran on speed—quick rollouts, minimal friction.
That’s where the loophole crept in.
Between July 17, 2024, and November 18, 2024, cyber crooks discovered a vulnerability in Real11’s payment gateway integration. Instead of topping up money into their wallets, they faked successful transactions. The system, trusting the fake signals, credited the wallet balances anyway.
Digital magic, as the fraudsters would probably call it.
Meet the Masterminds: Not Your Typical Hackers
On November 27, 2024, Amit walked into the Cyber Crime Police Station in Ghaziabad.
“Sir, it’s not just one guy. We’ve lost over a crore… they’ve been withdrawing for weeks without adding real money. And it looks like an organized gang.”
Within 48 hours, cops had a few names.
Deshraj, Abhishek Kumar, and Aakash, all from Barabanki, UP, were picked up from Vijay Nagar.
What surprised the cops wasn’t their age or background. It was how calmly they spoke, like they had rehearsed this.
During interrogation:
“It’s not just us,” Deshraj reportedly said. “My boys are smarter than I. Rajneesh is in Tamil Nadu. Anand’s somewhere in Jharkhand. They’re the real brains.”
Turns out, the entire family had turned digital crime into a part-time business.
And guess what? This wasn’t their first rodeo. Authorities later found evidence linking them to similar frauds in other apps too.
Lessons Buried in ₹1.01 Crore
One of the investigating officers said something that stuck with me:
“We chase bank robbers on bikes. Now we chase fraudsters hiding behind VPNs and fake wallets.”
This case isn’t just about one app being fooled. It’s about a bigger issue: how fast we’re building digital platforms without building equal strength in cyber defense.
These weren’t elite coders or foreign hackers. They were everyday guys from a small town who outsmarted a fantasy sports startup using nothing but time, patience, and a loophole.
Final Thoughts: Who’s Next?
What scares me most is how casual these scams are becoming. The tech is evolving. The fraudsters are adapting. And somewhere between growth and greed, platforms are skipping security checks.
Real11 was lucky. They detected it early. They acted. And they got help from a cyber crime team that didn’t treat this as “just another tech complaint.”
But for every scam caught, ten go unreported, or worse, unnoticed.
So next time you win a fantasy league, ask yourself: “Is it my skill… or someone else’s scam?”
