Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says the finance ministry is working with MeitY and RBI to clamp down on ponzi apps to prevent them from taking away hard earned money of gullible investors.

Cautioning investors against ponzi apps, Sitharaman says investors should do their due diligence and should not be lured by claims of lucrative returns made by them.

“There are also apps which are coming out and reaching out to people saying we can do this, we can do that. Your money will fetch you this much. Many of them are ponzi, the apps on which we are working with the Ministry concerned, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) and with the Reserve Bank and clamping down on them like never before, so that we don't get those ponzi apps, taking away hard earned money,” says Nirmala Sitharaman.

Speaking at the Thinkers Forum at Tumakuru (Karnataka), Nirmala Sitharaman says, social influencers and financial influencers are all out there but a strong sense of caution is required in each one of us to make sure we do double checking, counter checking, don't go as a flock into something and therefore protect hard-earned money.

“I'm not having any proposal before me for regulating them at this stage,” adds Sitharaman.
Asserting that investors should be cautious of influencers, she said if there are three or four people giving us very objective good advice; there may be seven others out of 10 who are probably driven by some other considerations.

As per the law the first claim on the recovered money will be of depositors and the proposed legislation also has some exclusion including money collected by real estate firms and from friends and relatives.