SEBI v. Gaurav Gupta, Rakesh Kumar Gupta and others (YouTube pump and dump, Sadhna Broadcast, 2025)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 8, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, in a single reading of the order; an independent second reading of 60 SEBI records agreed on every field for 56, the four misses being penalty amounts; a later sample of 50 of the SEBI records added on 9 October agreed on every field for 46. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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A SEBI whole-time member found that promoters of Sadhna Broadcast and a network of market operators ran a pump-and-dump scheme using misleading YouTube videos, paid promotion and structured trading, while the promoters sold part of their stake to retail buyers. The order covered 64 noticees, imposed bans of one or five years, disgorgement with interest, and penalties of about Rs 19.9 crore in aggregate.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

On 29 May 2025 a SEBI whole-time member issued a final order against 64 noticees in the matter of Sadhna Broadcast Limited, later renamed Crystal Business System, which was listed on BSE in January 2018. The case grew out of whistleblower complaints in mid-2022 about false YouTube videos and a paid promotion campaign, and SEBI carried out searches at fifteen noticees' premises. An interim order of March 2023 had restricted 31 of the noticees. The investigation period ran from 8 March to 30 November 2022.

SEBI alleged that promoter-group members, with outside operators, ran a coordinated scheme with four sets of roles: creators of misleading videos on channels such as The Advisor and Moneywise, which presented the company as a turnaround story and gave unrealistic price targets; connected sellers who offloaded shares at inflated prices; volume creators who traded in structured ways to simulate demand; and intermediaries who passed information between them. The notice invoked section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the PFUTP Regulations.

The member found a classic pump and dump. He recorded that the promoters, who held about 41 per cent in March 2022, sold more than 15 percentage points of their stake while the number of public shareholders rose from 885 to more than 72,000, and that the price later fell from above Rs 33 to about Rs 2.60. He held the PFUTP provisions violated by most noticees, while giving the benefit of doubt to a few. Proceedings against three noticees were disposed of without directions, and no penalty was imposed on several others, including a company then in insolvency proceedings, whose case is left to a separate order.

Seven noticees, including the promoters Gaurav Gupta and Rakesh Kumar Gupta and the video creator Manish Mishra, were restrained from the securities market for five years; most of the rest for one year. Each noticee was directed to disgorge its own computed gain, set out in a table, with 12 per cent annual simple interest from the end of the investigation period. Section 15HA penalties ranged from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 5 crore, with Rs 5 crore on Mr Mishra and Rs 2 crore each on five others. The penalty table adds up to about Rs 19.9 crore, a total this library computed because the order does not state one.

The record does not show whether any noticee appealed, how much of the disgorgement was recovered, or what the investors lost in total. The order is a regulatory finding and sanction, not a criminal conviction.

This library tags the matter as social-media ramping and pump and dump. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the order.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with 2 techniques in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Social media ramps — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.
• Pump and dump — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-05-29 SEBI order

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEBI order
• Order (PDF)

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added October 8, 2026. submit a correction.