Financial fraudsters are increasingly targeting small business accounts or current bank accounts for channeling large volumes of illicit fund transfers. According to top executives at fraud detection startups, initially fraudsters would typically take over retail and Jan Dhan accounts and convert them into mule accounts, but now they are increasingly looking at current accounts.

“We have seen such cases where mules are getting access to business PANs (permanent account numbers) easily and creating fake Udhyam certificates and using those to open current accounts under fake documents,” said Ranjan Reddy, founder of Bureau, a fraud and risk decisioning startup working with banks. The government issues Udhyam certificates for small enterprises and they can be downloaded online.

Rajit Bhattacharya, cofounder of Datasutram, a Mumbai-based identity verification startup, said banks are increasingly finding current accounts being taken over as mules. With scrutiny of savings accounts intensifying with the help of advanced software solutions to detect mules, fraudsters are continuously hunting for new ways of transferring illicit funds, said Bhattacharya.

ETtech

Mule accounts are those where the original owner has either ceded control of the account to a fraudster in lieu of money or has misplaced credentials of the account, resulting in a takeover by a miscreant. Typically, poor people and migrant workers are targeted for such activities. But now small business owners are also falling prey to such acts, industry insiders said. Any fund taken out of a victim’s account fraudulently gets routed through multiple such mule accounts to avoid detection.

“Scamsters have started using bulk payment methods through these current accounts, which have been taken over as mule accounts,” said Jayaprakash Kavala, chief of products at Clari5. Industry insiders told ET that startups are working with banks to start monitoring unusual fund movement in business accounts going beyond the mandate of tracking retail accounts only.

The Union Cabinet’s approval of a Rs 7,280 crore scheme to promote manufacturing of sintered rare earth permanent magnets (REPM) will help address a crucial missing link in India’s electric vehicle (EV) and chip supply chains, electronics and semiconductor industry executives said.

The programme aims to create 6,000 metric tonnes per annum of integrated REPM capacity through five globally bid projects, backed by sales-linked incentives and capital subsidy over a seven-year period.

Under the scheme, India will, for the first time, support end-to-end REPM manufacturing, from rare earth oxides to metals, alloys and finished magnets, in order to cut import dependence and serve fast-growing demand from EVs, renewables, industrial electronics and defence.

The government has earmarked Rs 6,450 crore for sales-linked incentives over five years and Rs 750 crore as capital support to set up the targeted 6,000 metric tonnes per annum capacity, with each of the five selected players expected to get up to 1,200 metric tonnes per annum.

Officials expect India’s REPM consumption to roughly double between 2025 and 2030, driven primarily by EVs and clean energy, making domestic capacity critical to supply chain security and the country’s Net Zero 2070 roadmap.
The scheme’s seven-year timeline includes a two-year gestation period for plants to come up, followed by five years of incentive disbursal linked to magnet sales.

Supply chain impact

The REPM scheme complements ongoing semiconductor and electronics initiatives by addressing a core upstream vulnerability in India’s EV and chip ecosystem, said industry executives.

Mayank Shrivastava, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and cofounder of AGNIT Semiconductors that specialises in gallium nitride semiconductor technology, said the programme is “as critical as building fabs”. This is because advanced electronics depends on magnetic materials as much as on silicon, and the initiative shores up a key weak link in the country’s electronics supply chain.

Rajoo Goel, secretary-general of the Electronic Industries Association of India, called the government scheme a first of its kind initiative focused on the core of the supply chain for electronics. Rare earth magnets are the strongest type of permanent magnet available, making them critical for emerging technology applications like electric motors for vehicles, defence and aerospace, renewable energy, computer hard drives and smaller electronics such as smartphones, he said.

These magnets are efficient, long-lasting, and have higher resistance to corrosion and high temperatures, he explained. With rapidly growing demand for electronic products and technology, magnets and inputs made of rare earth materials have become critical, he added.

The electronics industry is becoming increasingly dependent on the same and the countries which control their supply chain and technology have a geopolitical advantage and can dictate terms to the rest of the world, Goel said.
Vivek Tyagi, executive council member at the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, said the scheme could quickly reduce import dependence for two- and three-wheeler manufacturers while also benefiting four-wheeler players over time.

Several executives view the move as a logical follow-on to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's India Semiconductor Mission, aligning magnet manufacturing incentives with policies to attract chip fabs and advanced packaging units.

New investments in Andhra Pradesh

The policy push comes as Andhra Pradesh emerges as a hub for downstream electronics and semiconductor manufacturing linked to EVs and industrial applications.

Advanced System in Package (ASIP) Technologies is setting up an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test facility in the state in partnership with South Korea’s APACT, with an initial investment of Rs 468 crore.

Chennai-based Syrma SGS, through its unit Syrma Strategic Electronics, is also building a Rs 765 crore multilayer printed circuit board (PCB) plant in Andhra Pradesh under the Centre’s electronic component manufacturing scheme, strengthening local PCB availability for automotive and industrial original equipment manufacturers.

ASIP Technologies chief executive Venkata Simhadri said the rapid transition to EV two-wheelers and four-wheelers makes it “very important for India to create the local ecosystem and supply chain”, pointing to both semiconductors and REPMs as key components in the new mobility stack.

He highlighted that the REPM scheme, along with ISM incentives for fabs and advanced packaging, addresses crucial elements of the EV supply chain, from permanent magnet motors on the mechanical side to compound semiconductor-based motor control and battery charging systems on the electronics side.

Supply security gains

While many electronics manufacturing services (EMS) players do not directly process rare earth materials, they expect second-order benefits from improved magnet availability.

Syrma SGS managing director Jasbir Singh Gujral said REPMs are critical inputs for EV and semiconductor industries, and a domestic magnet ecosystem will indirectly help EMS companies by making the supply of magnet-based components more predictable and reducing the risk of supply chain disruptions.

Syrma’s own operations rely on components made using REPMs, rather than raw magnets themselves, so greater upstream resilience should translate into smoother sourcing for finished parts, he said.

"It's a very well curated scheme that is coming at the apt time. It's going to take some time for these capacities to get created but the reactions I'm getting from my peers are quite positive," an EMS company executive said on the condition of anonymity.

"There is a belief that the investments are going to come in. And this is again de-risking from the borderland country which is absolutely prudent," he said.

For fabless firms such as BigEndian Semiconductors, which designs custom system-on-chip (SoC) solutions from its Bengaluru base while partnering with a foundry in Taiwan, the scheme stresses India’s intent to build deeper hardware value chains.

Cofounder and chief executive Sunil Kumar cautioned that gestation-heavy incentive schemes tend to favour already established large organisations. However, innovation often comes from smaller challengers, making it important for policy to be calibrated to company size, he argued.

MSME opportunities

Academia and skill-development experts expect the REPM scheme to catalyse new electronics manufacturing clusters, particularly for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and startups in advanced materials and magnet-based components.

T Senthil Siva Subramanian, who heads the Institute Industry Interface programme at Hindustan College of Science and Technology in Mathura, said the scheme can help create MSME-focused electronics clusters that bridge lab-to-market gaps, generate new job roles through skilling, and encourage startups in REPM and related applications.

He added that such clusters can feed into broader initiatives like “Vocal for Local” and “One District One Product” by nurturing “swadeshi” proof-of-concepts, while also advancing UN Sustainable Development Goals related to industry, innovation, infrastructure and climate action.

Strategic and innovation lens

Experts argue that domestic REPM capacity carries strategic weight beyond EVs, given its applications in defence, medical devices, nuclear research reactors and precision agriculture equipment.

Subramanian pointed out that magnets such as samarium-cobalt and neodymium-iron-boron are critical across defence security systems, electronic traction motors, therapeutic medical equipment, nuclear research reactors and electronic farm machinery, and that local design and production capabilities can enhance India’s strategic autonomy and global ranking in high-tech manufacturing.

He also expects the scheme to spur intangible investments in design tools, miniaturised products, software and intellectual property around rare earth magnets, boosting India’s standing in global innovation indices and helping domestic products progress across technology, customer, manufacturing and investment readiness levels.

For policymakers and industry, the REPM push is increasingly seen as a foundational layer that strengthens everything from chip packaging and compound semiconductors to EVs, robotics and flexible electronics.

(With inputs from Dia Rekhi in Chennai)

Samuel B Anthil, professor at Harvard Business School wrote in his paper published in 2019, “Hasty liquidations cost creditors billions of dollars a year, What if more bankrupt companies were restructured—and revived—instead?” He studied 30 years of court filings in the USA and established that in case of restructurings, creditors recover most of what they’re owed as the company begins turning a profit. But despite that, there are liquidations where creditors miss out on billions of dollars every year.

Three things that stood out from the article which was based on Samuel’s research of the US corporate rulings were

-External consultants helping a company navigate any setback, often push for faster payouts, without seeking consent from creditors

- Judges are often driven by business justification provided in some sort of way to rule in favour of liquidation without considering the harm to stakeholders

- According to Antill’s analysis, creditors would gain a potential 52 cents on each dollar owed when a company is restructured
Closer to home, the scenario is not quite different. There is however an explanation for the same. There is an overlap of India’s NCLT restructuring function with its insolvency function which means that companies filing for scheme of arrangement must get in line behind the already congested list of hearings, leading to significant business costs, stakeholder uncertainty and unprecedented delays. According to the Indian Journal of Law and Legal Research, as of March 2025, over 15,000 cases were pending before the NCLT. The same study also indicates that in India, “financial creditors get back 32% of their claims, and operational creditors recover about 25%. Liquidation cases paint an even grimmer picture. Only INR 8,943 crores came back from admitted claims of INR 228,702.84 crores - a tiny 3% recovery rate.”

Legal milestone that signals structure and maturity
In July 2024, WazirX filed an application in Singapore to apply for Restructuring of its platform after a massive cyberattack resulted in the theft of a significant portion of its assets. In October, the Singapore High Court approved the Scheme and operations at WazirX started soon after.

WazirX pulled off the most difficult, arduous but arguably a creditor friendly restructuring process and started operations, all in just over a year. No external advisor or creditor saw merit in advising judiciary proceedings towards liquidation, barring a few. While it is a great demonstration of grit and resilience of Indian companies and founders, the Singapore High Court, whose legal framework for digital assets has given crypto projects a structured path for recovery and compliance, must be given due credit.

Innovation alone can no longer define its progress; it must now move hand-in-hand with structure, accountability, and credible governance. The recent court approval of WazirX’s restructuring and its return to live operations mark a meaningful signal in this direction. In many

ways, WazirX’s comeback is not just a story of resilience and resurrection but also of regulatory maturity meeting technological perseverance.

Zettai, WazirX’s Singapore based entity, opted for restructuring under the High Court of Singapore to benefit from its swift and advanced regulatory clarity tailored for emerging technologies like crypto. They balance innovation with trust and offer frameworks that are known to produce fair, transparent outcomes for all parties involved.

A steep slope to scale the mountain
Last year, WazirX suffered one of the most significant cyber-attacks in the global crypto space

— a blow that would have permanently crippled most exchanges. Such ruptures undermine investor trust and challenge how platforms manage transparency and recovery. Wazirx decided to restructure its operations amidst this setback, a move seen as both bold and to some extent, reckless.

Then began a series of ordeal which involved townhalls with creditors to understand the terms of the scheme, users losing their patience and trust amidst no access to funds, and a looming uncertainty for the industry. The terms of the Scheme were, however, overwhelmingly supported by creditors indicating trust in WazirX and its founder who showed up for them and led this effort with external help and advisories. Creditors chose the fastest way out to maximise recoveries which was only possible due to how the Scheme was designed. The court granted its nod after a series of initial setbacks. WazirX has finally resumed operations. For many users who had lost funds, this moment offered both relief and reflection.

When resilience meets regulation
The significance of WazirX’s restart goes far beyond a company reopening its operations. WazirX’s recovery was formalised through legal oversight, audited by independent parties, and aligned with judicially sanctioned terms. This adds a legitimacy that few exchanges globally have demonstrated post-crisis.

Along with that it solidifies Singapore’s position as a leader in legal framework for emerging technologies, having sanctioned the biggest and one of the very few restructurings that the crypto industry has ever seen. When a court sanctions a restructuring plan, it’s not a symbolic victory. It's an institutional endorsement. It provides a roadmap vetted by law, one that considers creditor rights, user safety, and operational integrity. For non crypto companies as well, Singapore's restructuring law is considered to be the best because it has an agile framework that allows companies to work with external legal experts during restructurings and the underlying intent is always preserving a company value over liquidation.

WazirX’s decision to choose Singapore as the jurisdiction of choice, mirrors its own approach towards the industry as a whole. The company’s persistence, its focus on user restitution, and its adherence to due process now stand as a model for what disciplined recovery in crypto can look like. It proves that setbacks don’t end innovation, they refine it.

How Indian policymakers and industry can make it better
If India aims to be a leader in blockchain and Web3, policy must evolve to match the pace of technology. Domestic exchanges can show integrity and resilience, but without clear, enabling laws, the road ahead remains uncertain. WazirX’s restart under a court-approved scheme is a real-world case study in choosing the harder path which is built on compliance, oversight, and creditor support, rather than quick fixes which would have been abandoning the exchange in favour of liquidation. It challenges the notion that crypto exists in regulatory grey zones. Instead, it shows that transparency, legality, and innovation can coexist.

The message to policymakers is clear: India doesn’t just need trading platforms; it needs regulatory clarity and institutions that anchor credibility in a rapidly changing digital financial landscape. The recent Madras High Court judgement which recognized crypto as a property augurs well for the entire crypto industry. The industry needs comprehensive guidelines on licensing, custody,disclosures, arbitration and insolvency to ensure institutional participation which is necessary for the growth of blockchain and web3 companies.

India’s parliamentary standing committee on Finance has chosen the subject ‘A study on Virtual Digital Assets (VDAs) and Way Forward’ for detailed deliberations on cryptoassets. Crypto and web3 stakeholders should proactively engage with the committee to ensure industry’s views are factored in. India missed the semiconductor chip ‘bus’ due to policy paralysis in the 90s, it cannot afford to repeat the same mistake. Indian regulators should move forward and implement the Financial Stability Board (FSB)’s Global Crypto Asset Framework. FSB’s recent report released in October revealed that uneven implementation of the FSB Global Crypto-Asset Framework creates opportunities for regulatory arbitrage and complicates oversight of the cryptoasset market, which is inherently global and evolving.

Rebuilding trust, block by block
With WazirX operational again, users are receiving funds in a formal distribution process. But rebuilding trust in crypto requires collective effort from all stakeholders of the web3 ecosystem . It requires collective responsibility. Regulators must enable, startups must comply, and users must demand clarity and fairness. Building trust in crypto is not a solo sprint but a relay, passed between all participants in the ecosystem.

For WazirX, this marks the beginning of a new chapter. For India’s crypto community, it’s a reminder that every crisis can become a catalyst when met with an indomitable spirit to bounce back.

The journey ahead will require sustained audits, real-time disclosures, and adherence to global compliance standards. But this much is certain with the baton now passed to an ecosystem reborn through accountability, India’s crypto space has a chance to redefine trust on its own terms.

*The article is authored by Sharat Chandra. Sharat is a tech advisor with a focus on blockchain, digital transformation and fintech. He is the founder of EmpowerEdge Ventures.

Nvidia on Monday released new open-source software aimed at speeding up the development of self-driving cars using some of the newest "reasoning" techniques in artificial intelligence.

Nvidia has risen to become the world's most valuable company as its chips have become central to the development of AI. But the company also maintains a broad software research arm that releases open-source AI code that others, such as Palantir Technologies, can adopt.

On Monday, Nvidia released Alpamayo-R1 for self-driving vehicles. The software is what is known as a "vision-language-action" AI model, which means that the self-driving vehicle translates what its sensor banks see on the road into a description using natural language.

The breakthrough with Alpamayo, which was named for a mountain peak in Peru that is particularly tricky to scale, is that it thinks aloud to itself as it plans its path through the world.

For example, if the car sees a bike path, it will note that it sees the path and is adjusting course.

Most previous self-driving car software was limited in how it explained why the car chose a particular path, making it hard for engineers to understand what needed to be fixed to make the cars safer.

"One of the entire motivations behind making this open is so that developers and researchers can... understand how these models work so we can, as an industry, come up with standard ways of evaluating how they work," Katie Young, senior marketing manager for the automotive enterprise at Nvidia, told Reuters.

The Kerala High Court on Thursday ordered Byju’s parent Think & Learn’s (TLPL) resolution professional (RP), Shailendra Ajmera, an authorised representative of Glas Trust, which represents the edtech firm’s US lenders, and EY India chairman Rajiv Memani to appear on December 5 in contempt proceedings related to its foreign assets.

The order was passed in a petition filed by Voizzit Technology, which has claimed rights over TLPL’s foreign assets, including kids’ learning platform Epic and coding platform Tynker.

Based on the petition, the Kerala High Court in May had restrained the RP and the lenders from selling these assets. However, the US bankruptcy attorney Claudia Springer, who has been managing the insolvency proceedings of Byju's subsidiaries in the US, had gone ahead with the auction of these assets.

On June 10, ET reported that Byju Alpha, a special vehicle set up by founder Byju Raveendran to receive the $1.2 billion loan, is selling its US assets at a fraction of the price it paid to acquire them, as creditors pushed to recover their dues from the edtech firm whose American operations are undergoing bankruptcy proceedings.

Chicago-based computer science education company CodeHS acquired Tynker for $2.2 million in cash, while China's TAL Education Group paid $95 million for Epic.

The proceeds from the sale were used to repay Byju’s creditors. Last year in June, some lenders within a consortium that loaned $1.2 billion to Byju’s had initiated bankruptcy proceedings against the three subsidiaries.

According to a court document filed by TLPL cofounder Riju Ravindran, these international subsidiaries, including Tangible Play, Great Learning, Alpha, Epic, and Tynker, were acquired for an aggregate cost of about $1.42 billion.

Recently, a US bankruptcy court order directed Raveendran to pay more than $1 billion, ruling that he obstructed efforts to trace the $533 million that the edtech’s lenders alleged he had diverted from an American subsidiary.

The court ruled that Raveendran had ignored its orders and failed to participate in the proceedings after a group of lenders who had given a $1.2 billion term loan to the subsidiary, Byju’s Alpha, filed a motion for default against him on August 11. On Thursday, Raveendran said that he will file an appeal against this US order.

Billionaire Elon Musk reiterated plans to develop X into a ‘superapp’ with multiple services on a single platform — similar to China’s WeChat — during a recent conversation with Zerodha cofounder Nikhil Kamath.

Talking about his affinity for the letter ‘X,’ Musk recounted on Kamath’s ‘People by WTF’ podcast that plans for a financial exchange with the domain name ‘X.com’ manifested in the form of PayPal. The digital payments platform was later acquired by eBay in 2002, but the online marketplace later offered the domain name back to Musk.

Buying microblogging site Twitter in 2022 rekindled the original plan of building X.com as a financial platform. “Then I was like, ‘Well, maybe this — acquiring Twitter — would also be an opportunity to revisit the original plan of X.com, which is to create this clearing house of financial transactions.’ Basically, to create a more efficient money database, is a way to think about it,” Musk said.

Shortly after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk renamed the company X. In March 2025, his artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI bought X in a $33-billion all-stock deal.

In January, Visa partnered with X Money to offer online transactions and digital wallet services later this year. Reports claimed in June that the platform is planning to launch a customisable physical debit card tied to a user’s X handle.

“I also like the idea of having a unified app or website or whatever, where you can do anything you want there. You know, China has this with WeChat… where you can exchange information, you can publish information, you can exchange money. People kind of live their (lives) on WeChat in China. And it's quite useful, but there's no real WeChat outside of China. So, it's kind of WeChat++, I'd say, is the idea for X,” Musk said.

Also Read: Tesla boss Elon Musk holds forth on tariffs, H-1B visas and more on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast

Solar confluence of Space X, Tesla, xAI

Musk’s three tech businesses — SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI — could work together to harness “a non-trivial amount” of solar energy.

“If the future is solar-powered AI satellites — which it pretty much needs to be in order to harness a non-trivial amount of the energy of the Sun — you have to move to solar-powered AI satellites in deep space. That is somewhat a confluence of Tesla expertise, SpaceX expertise, and xAI on the AI front,” Musk said.

AI in space made headlines last month with Google’s Project Suncatcher. Under this initiative, the tech giant plans to launch satellites with its tensor processing units (TPUs) as a precursor to using solar energy to power AI data centres and cool them with the vacuum of outer space.