For over a decade, gangs across Jammu and Kashmir have sold ordinary stones and false promises as rare “heavenly” metal, duping victims out of crores through fake science and fear of missing out.
Seven men sat inside Police Station Heerpora on a Saturday in Shopian. Beside them lay a box holding a plain stone and Rs 5 lakh in cash. Police said the stone had been sold as a rare and valuable Trath Gola, believed by buyers to be sort of a meteorite. Two Alto cars were seized for examination. An FIR, numbered 95 of 2026, now runs at Heerpora.
The seven came from different corners of Kashmir: Baramulla, Srinagar, Sopore, Anantnag, Kulgam.
It was not an unusual case. It was the latest chapter of one that is now over a decade old.
Old Story
The idea itself is a kind of recent folklore. Somewhere in the Chenab Valley, in Doda, over a decade ago, a gang of smart men began telling wealthier neighbours a curious tale. A thunder, they said, is not only lightning and rain. It is an explosion of a heavenly material. Each storm leaves behind, somewhere on earth, a small ball of this material, sort of a defused grenade. It is rare. It must be searched for after every storm. And if found, it holds immense, almost magical, properties, they would say
They called it Trath Gola.
The claim asked people to believe in something beautiful and improbable: that the sky drops treasure, and that they alone had a way to find it. For a certain kind of buyer, moneyed but hungry for more, the story proved irresistible.
First Complaint
The paper trail begins in September 2013, with FIR No 110/2013 at Police Station Kud. It did not start as a fraud case. Police suspected an unknown network was funding the banned outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, using hawala money to recruit young men around Patnitop.
One man, Mohammad Iqbal, was arrested and interrogated. He disclosed that the money had passed through his family: to his brothers Tahir and Jalil, his son Mudassir, and onward to others. Investigators traced 80 lakh to one Parvaiz Mir, 45 lakh each to Angad Manhas and Sandeep Singh Rana. Iqbal himself deposited Rs 20 lakh in his son’s name at a Mansar bank branch, and bought a Scorpio registered to his nephew.
The militancy angle did not hold. What surfaced instead was Trath Gola. Another accused, Akhtar Mir, told police that Iqbal and Jalil were trying to sell a “precious article” to a Jammu firm, and that he had helped broker the deal.
That firm belonged to Raj Kumar Gupta, an industrialist and partner in Jhelum Infra Project. Gupta’s own engineer, Narayan Raina, allegedly connived with the accused, telling his employer the stone was magical and would make him “a business tycoon.” Gupta paid Rs 25 lakh as advance at Patnitop on August 3, 2013, and the balance toward a promised Rs 2 crore on August 30. The item was never handed over.
The case was transferred from Kud to the Crime Branch, Jammu, on January 11, 2014, once the militancy charges were dropped.
Case Unravels
Separately, in May 2016, the Crime Branch announced a recovery of over Rs 1 crore from a gang cheating the public with the same story, “purportedly used for space research but was in reality a hoax.”
The alleged kingpin, Venkata Krishna Modegula of Secunderabad, had posed as a scientist affiliated with NASA and DRDO, issuing certificates for the “precious metal” and collecting Rs 3 crore from Gupta, who reports at the time said he had been targeted for a total of Rs 8 crore. Sandeep Singh Rana of Doda was arrested alongside him; police recovered Rs 1.5 lakh and a licensed pistol from Rana, bought with the proceeds.
Modegula’s bail plea was rejected, the court noting he was “part of the wide network spread all over the country.” He eventually surrendered Rs 1 crore to the Crime Branch.
Fifteen more suspects, all from Anantnag and Kulgam, were named at the time. It is not clear from later records whether they were ever arrested.
Whether this recovery and the Kud FIR describe the same fraud against Gupta, were the same case or two separate cases is still not known.
Charges Framed
The Crime Branch’s investigation into this case produced a charge sheet in December 2018. In August 2020, the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Udhampur, framed charges against 12 accused under Sections 420 and 120-B RPC, over the Rs 5.60 crore allegedly paid for the “precious metal.”
Among the twelve was Modegula again, named in the charge sheet as the “tester of Trath Gola.” The list ran across Doda, Udhampur and Jammu.
Investment Twist
Not every Trath Gola case involved a stone changing hands. In Pulwama, police alleged a gang headed by Abdul Hamid Dar of Tujan had been active since 2012, running something closer to a Ponzi scheme: persuading people to hand over money, and in some cases sell their property, on the promise of “double and triple” returns under the Trath Gola name.
Three men, including Dar himself, were detained under the Public Safety Act in May 2022 after an FIR was registered under Sections 420 and 120-B IPC. All three detentions were quashed by the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
The judgments turned on a distinction between “law and order” and “public order.” As Justice Sanjeev Kumar put it, the two “look deceptively similar but have different connotations.” His illustration: two drunkards fighting in a public street is disorder, but not public disorder. Cheating, however large the sum, does not become a threat to public order unless it disturbs “the even tempo of life of the community.”
Smaller Sums
Not every case runs into crores. In October 2021, three men were arrested within two hours of a complaint at Police Station Magam, Budgam, after selling a Ganderbal resident a plain stone as “rare metal” for Rs 4 lakh at village Badren. Rs 4 lakh was recovered on the spot.
Budgam police described it plainly in a statement: three persons had been arrested “for trying to sell a fake Space object (Trath Gola).”
