Video of ED Raid on a Kolkata-based firm is shared as that of raid on cloth merchant's house in Surat - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
October 4, 2023
Update (04 October 2023):
The same video is being circulated with claims that it showcases a raid on BJP leader Sekhar Agarwal in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. However, as previously clarified, the footage is from an ED raid conducted at an e-gaming firm in Kolkata in 2022. The owner of the firm is Amir Khan.
Published (13 September 2022):
A video is being shared on social media through a post where a few men can be seen counting cash with heaps of money lying around. The post claims that these are the visuals of an Enforcement Directorate (ED) raid conducted at the house of a Surat-based cloth merchant named Sekhar Agarwal. We have also found a few similar posts (here and here) doing rounds on social media. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of the Enforcement Directorate’s raid at the house of a Surat-based cloth merchant named Sekhar Agarwal.
Fact: The visuals of the post are from the ED Raid conducted at an e-gaming firm in Kolkata. The name of the firm’s owner is Amir Khan. The viral post falsely attributes this video to a cloth merchant named Sekhar Agarwal. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To investigate the claim’s veracity, we searched on the internet with relevant keywords, looking for news reports on ED raid on Surat-based cloth merchant Sekhar Agarwal. But we did not find any relevant information. Then we looked for reports about the recent raids conducted by the ED and found a few news reports which contain the same visuals from the viral post.
According to a news report by NDTV, Enforcement Directorate has conducted a search operation at the premises of a businessman named Aamir Khan, who promotes an e-gaming app known as E-Nuggets. The video in the article has the same visuals as the viral post, from the 1:11 sec. timestamp. A few other media reports on this search operation can be seen here and here. This proves that the visuals shown in the viral video do not belong to an ED raid conducted at a Surat-based merchant named Sekhar Agarwal, as it claims.
To sum up, a video of an ED Raid conducted on a Kolkata-based firm is being shared as visuals of the raid at a cloth merchant’s house in Surat.