₹86.47 lakh of gold and silver never reach a Sardarnagar buyer
A woman's Ahmedabad complaint itemises ₹23.47 lakh for 150 grams of gold and ₹63 lakh for 28 kilos of silver, neither delivered. Police tell Divya Bhaskar more than twenty people dealt with the pair over seven months.
By Carat Capital
What changed
A complaint names a figure. Ahmedabad's crime branch has registered a ₹86.47 lakh case against the owners of Komal Jewellers in Sardarnagar. The complaint itemises 150 grams of gold and 28 kilos of silver, paid for and not delivered.
What it means
- If you buy gold outside the bill: The two line items here price gold at ₹15,646.67 a gram. That is above the full, undiscounted rate a Bhuj seller named six days earlier.
- If you run a counter in Gujarat: This is the third alleged jewellery fraud in the state this paper has reported in a week, and the second in Ahmedabad.
- What this is not: A conviction, a charge sheet or an assay. No metal has been tested, no court has ruled, and the ₹100 crore aggregate is a police estimate given to a newspaper.
Key figures
| The complaint's total₹23.47 lakh gold plus ₹63 lakh silver | ₹86.47 lakh |
|---|---|
| Paid per gram of goldon Carat Capital's division, purity unstated | ₹15,646.67 |
| Paid per kilo of silveron Carat Capital's division | ₹2,25,000 |
| People police say dealt with the pairover seven months | 20+ |
Source: All rupee figures from Divya Bhaskar's report, read from the raw page, 200, 420,527 bytes, JSON-LD datePublished 2026-10-18T05:30:00+05:30. The per-gram and per-kilo figures are Carat Capital's division of the complaint's own two line items. These are allegations at complaint stage; nobody has been convicted.
Two line items and a total
The woman's figures. She told the crime branch she paid ₹23.47 lakh towards 150 grams of gold and ₹63 lakh towards 28 kilos of silver. Neither was delivered.
They add up exactly. The two amounts sum to ₹86.47 lakh, the figure the complaint states. Police registered the case at a rounded ₹87 lakh.
The pair are absent. Divya Bhaskar reports the father and son as having fled. No charge sheet has been filed and no court has heard the matter.
| Item | Quantity | Amount paid | Unit price on our division |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold | 150 grams | ₹23.47 lakh | ₹15,646.67 a gram |
| Silver | 28 kilos | ₹63 lakh | ₹2,25,000 a kilo |
| Complaint total | - | ₹86.47 lakh | - |
| Case registered at | - | ₹87 lakh | - |
| Bhuj full rate, 11 October | 1 kilo, 24 carat | ₹1.40 crore | ₹14,000 a gram |
| Bhuj asking price, 11 October | 1 kilo, 24 carat | ₹1 crore | ₹10,000 a gram |
Notes on this table
Arithmetic printed so it can be checked. 23,47,000 / 150 = 15,646.67 a gram; multiplied by ten, ₹1,56,467 per ten grams. 63,00,000 / 28 = 2,25,000 a kilo. 23,47,000 + 63,00,000 = 86,47,000, matching the complaint's stated total exactly. Against Bhuj: 15,646.67 / 14,000 = 1.1176, so 11.8% above the full rate named there; 15,646.67 / 10,000 = 1.5647, so 56.5% above the asking price. The Bhuj quotes were for 24-carat metal and the Ahmedabad complaint states no fineness, so the comparison is of money paid, not of like metal.
The discount that was not one
The pitch was Dubai. The pair told their community the gold came cheap out of Dubai. They offered a tola at ₹5,000 to ₹6,000 under market, and silver up to ₹10,000 less a kilo.
The maths disagrees. Her gold works out at ₹15,646.67 a gram. A Bhuj agent this paper reported on 11 October called ₹14,000 a gram the full, undiscounted rate for 24-carat metal.
Purity is the gap. Bhuj was quoted as 24 carat. The Ahmedabad complaint states no fineness, no hallmark and no date for either transaction, so the two are not like metal.
The bigger number is softer
Police estimate the rest. Officers put the combined value ordered over seven months at more than ₹100 crore. Individual dealings ran ₹50 lakh to ₹1 crore.
It carries no document. That aggregate is a round figure given to a reporter. No charge sheet, seizure memo or itemised schedule is cited anywhere in the report.
Most deliveries happened. Police describe metal changing hands for most of the seven months, with buyers reselling at a profit. The money disappeared on the final lot.
What to watch
- Next few weeksA charge sheet. It would replace the ₹100 crore estimate with an itemised total and name the number of complainants.
- OngoingWhether either man is arrested. Both are reported absconding and neither has answered the allegation.
- OngoingWhether any seized metal is assayed. No fineness has been established for anything described in this case.
The story so far
Go deeper
What would change this call
An assay and a charge sheet. Every figure here comes from one complainant's statement as a newspaper reports it, and a first information report records what a complainant says and nothing more. If the 150 grams were to include making charges, stones or a part-payment against a larger order, the per-gram figure collapses and the comparison with Bhuj goes with it. The report does not say, and this paper has not reached the complainant or the crime branch.
Why a fake-smuggling pitch needs a real delivery first
The structure in this complaint is older than the metal. A seller offers goods below market on a premise the buyer cannot verify and would not want verified, usually that duty has been avoided. The illegality is the point: it explains the discount, it explains the absence of a bill, and it guarantees the buyer will not complain to anyone while the arrangement is working. The first several rounds are then delivered honestly, at or near the promised price, which is what the police account describes here across most of seven months. Those rounds are not the fraud, they are the cost of it. They convert a stranger into a repeat customer who tells others, which is how twenty people from one community end up dealing with the same two men. The loss arrives on the largest lot, after the buyer has scaled up on the strength of the earlier ones, and it arrives at a moment when the victim has the weakest possible footing for a complaint. What makes this particular case worth printing is that the arithmetic in the one itemised complaint does not support the premise at all. The woman paid more per gram than a different Gujarat seller called his full rate six days earlier, in this paper's own reporting. The discount was the story the buyers were told. It was not, on these two numbers, the deal they got.
Method
One primary, fetched in this run and saved as raw bytes before any figure was read: divyabhaskar.co.in, 200, 420,527 bytes. Date established from the page's own JSON-LD datePublished, 2026-10-18T05:30:00+05:30. Figures were read from the article body inside the single article block, not from the page as a whole. ARCHIVE, by entity: grep -ril 'Komal' website/*.html returns 0, grep -ril 'Komal Jewel' returns 0 and grep -ril 'Sardarnagar' returns 0. Those zeroes were validated against a positive control before being written up, because a grep that returns zero may be a wrong query rather than an absence: grep -ril 'Wadaj' website/*.html returns 5 hits, which is this paper's own Ahmedabad fraud story of 12 October, so the search term, the file set and the method all match this archive's schema. The 12 October story was opened and read: it concerns S.S. Ornaments in Wadaj and ₹87.81 lakh of gold sent out for stone setting, a different firm, a different locality and a different complainant. DIFFERENT ENTITY, not a repeat. The Bhuj comparison is drawn from this paper's own article of 11 October, opened and read in this run, which states that the agent 'had called ₹1.40 crore the full rate' and that 'the figure finally named was a round ₹1 crore a kilo'. Both of those sentences were quoted from the stored article record, not recalled.