On the morning of February 23, 2026, the phones of political workers, journalists and ordinary citizens across West Bengal began buzzing with condolence messages. Mukul Roy, the Chanakya of Bengal politics who had helped build the Trinamool Congress from scratch, had died at a Kolkata hospital after a prolonged battle with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
Somewhere, in a scam factory, a document was being edited simultaneously. Mukul’s name was being substituted into a pre-written template. His photograph was being added to a fabricated news banner carrying the masthead of The Indian Express. Within days of his death, a sponsored advertisement began spreading across Facebook, directing readers to a convincing counterfeit of an Indian Express article, complete with the newspaper’s fonts, its logo, and an invented byline, claiming that Roy had secretly accumulated ₹11.2 billion through an AI-powered investment platform called SolariaVionex, and that this platform was still “open to the public”.
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It was, from start to finish, a lie. But it was a very carefully engineered one. The article that circulated was not a crude fake. It was polished, emotionally resonant and precisely calibrated to exploit the psychological state of someone grieving a public figure. It deployed fabricated quotes from a “notary Amit Verma”, invented a loyal confidant named “Sanjay Sen”, and constructed a narrative arc about a politician’s secret passion for digital finance. It even included a quote from Mukul’s son Subhranshu, manufacturing words of filial wisdom that the real Subhranshu Roy never said.
The article claimed Mukul had discovered SolariaVionex “in the final years of his political career” and had accumulated roughly ₹11.2 billion through the platform, the funds he chose to leave untouched as a kind of “digital legacy”. Readers were then told the platform was available to anyone, with a minimum deposit of just ₹23,000, average monthly returns of ₹2.4 lakh to ₹6 lakh and a “personal account manager” who would call them after registration.
Fact-checking organisations, including Factly and NewsMeter, were swift to investigate. Their findings were unambiguous: no credible evidence existed that Mukul had any association with SolariaVionex. Multiple websites operated under the same name, and none displayed any verifiable licence from SEBI, RBI, or any recognised financial authority.
>> Not the First Time. Not the Last
The most interesting fact about the Mukul Roy scam article is that it is word-for-word identical, save the name, to another article that circulated just weeks earlier, when Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar died in a plane crash near Baramati Airport on January 28, 2026. The same notary. The same confidant. The same ₹11.2 billion. The same ₹23,000 minimum deposit. The same reassurance that “withdrawals are processed instantly, including on weekends, with no hidden fees”.
The Pawar version had been debunked in detail by the Maharashtra government before Roy’s death. The Maharashtra government’s Directorate General of Information and Public Relations formally issued a statement confirming the advertisement was false.
The scammers simply waited for the next high-profile death, changed the name and a few biographical details and redeployed the same article. This template approach, what cybersecurity researchers call a “kill-and-reload” fraud cycle, means the operational cost of each new scam is close to zero. The deception machine is already built. It simply needs a new face.
This pattern has global precedents. In the West, similar template scams have deployed the names of Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos in fake endorsements for AI investment platforms. In India, the technique is adapted to the contours of a political culture where certain figures command deep loyalty across regions, castes and party lines, making them uniquely powerful bait for emotionally susceptible readers.
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Investment scams of this type do not rely on greed alone, that is too simple an explanation, and it insults the victims. They rely on the combined weight of several psychological pressures acting simultaneously.
The first is borrowed authority. By placing their fabricated story inside the recognisable shell of a trusted masthead like The Indian Express, scammers do not ask victims to trust them, they ask victims to trust a publication they have trusted for years. The fraud is essentially invisible at a glance, which is the only glance most readers give a social media link.
The second is narrative plausibility. The article about Mukul is not written like an advertisement. It is written like a feature story, complete with pacing, tension, character development and emotional resonance. The detail about Mukul watching “the artificial intelligence at work” every morning after breakfast is the kind of particular, human detail that signals authenticity to a reader’s pattern-recognition instincts. This is not accidental. These articles are professionally crafted.
The third is temporal pressure disguised as opportunity. The article emphasises that the account “remains active” and “continues to grow” — that the opportunity discovered by the deceased is still available, but by implication will not be forever. This creates urgency without making it explicit, avoiding the kind of “act now!” language that has trained some readers to be suspicious.
Finally, there is grief itself. People who are mourning a public figure are, briefly, in a state of heightened emotional engagement with stories about that figure. They want to read more. They want to feel a connection. The scam articles are designed to satisfy exactly this need, and to redirect it toward a financial action.
>> India’s Investment Scam: The Numbers
The SolariaVionex operation is a small node in what has become a colossal criminal industry. In 2025, Indians filed 28.15 lakh cybercrime complaints, a 24 per cent increase from the year before, resulting in losses of ₹22,495 crore. Investment fraud was not merely one category among many: it accounted for 76 per cent of all financial losses and 35 per cent of all reported cases. Put simply, if an Indian became a victim of online financial crime in 2025, there was better than a three-in-four chance that a fake investment scheme was the weapon used.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has formally identified this as a global phenomenon, tracing much of the operational infrastructure — fake call centres, “account managers,” scam factories — to compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where, in a grim irony, some of the operators are themselves trafficking victims, coerced into defrauding others under threat of violence.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) has partnered with Google to share threat intelligence on pig-butchering and celebrity-impersonation scams. The government has blocked fraudulent transactions worth more than ₹8,031 crore since the I4C’s inception. These are meaningful interventions. But they are reactive — triggered after victims have already been targeted and funds have already moved. The scam article about Mukul circulated for days before it was formally debunked.
India now has 459 dedicated cybercrime police stations, up from 169 in 2020. The 1930 helpline has saved thousands of crores through real-time intervention. But awareness, the ability of an ordinary citizen to pause for two seconds before clicking a link and ask whether what they are seeing is real, remains, as the Ministry of Home Affairs has repeatedly acknowledged, the weakest link in the country’s cyber defence.
(Pinakpani Ghosh is a Kolkata-based senior journalist)
