Madhya Pradesh High Court sets aside organised-crime charge under Section 111 BNS in Indore cyber-fraud case

Justice Gajendra Singh held that 28 NCRP complaints under investigation cannot satisfy Section 111 BNS’s pre-condition of more than one prior charge-sheet in the past ten years; the trial court was directed to instead consider Section 112 BNS on petty organised crime.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court at Indore has set aside the framing of charges under Section 111(4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 against an accused in a multi-State cyber-fraud case, holding that the prosecution’s reliance on 28 NCRP complaints still under investigation cannot satisfy the statutory pre-condition of more than one prior charge-sheet in the preceding ten years. Justice Gajendra Singh, sitting at the Indore bench, partly allowed the criminal revision filed by Hiralal, a resident of Udaipur, while affirming the other charges framed against him.

The order, delivered on 30 April 2026 in Hiralal v. State of Madhya Pradesh, is one of the early High Court rulings to read down the new BNS organised-crime provision in the framing-of-charges context, drawing on a string of decisions interpreting the analogous Maharashtra and Gujarat organised-crime statutes.

The trail of bank accounts and a WhatsApp group

The case began with an FIR registered on 30 October 2024 at the Crime Branch police station, Indore, on the complaint of one Amit Upadhayay. He alleged that members of a WhatsApp group calling itself “UBS Securities” pitched him a stock-market investment plan and induced him to transfer about Rs. 26.55 lakh into multiple bank accounts. The investigation widened. A charge-sheet under Section 193 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita was filed against three named accused — Vinay Yadav of Ratlam, and Rahul Yadav and Hiralal, both of Udaipur — while investigation was kept pending against others.

The prosecution case against Hiralal was that he was the middleman in the supply chain of bank accounts. According to the statement of co-accused Vinay Mewada recorded on 14 December 2024, Hiralal procured bank accounts from Rahul Yadav at Rs. 5,000 per account and passed them on to Mewada at Rs. 10,000. On 19 June 2024, Rahul Yadav allegedly couriered four SBI accounts — with cheque book, ATM cards, a SIM and the Gmail login — to Hiralal. The State told the Court that those accounts and linked mobile numbers had surfaced in 28 separate complaints across 11 States on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, with combined fraud sums running into several crores credited to SBI, Axis Bank and Indusind Bank accounts.

The trial court, by its order of 13 May 2025, framed charges under Sections 318(4) read with 3(5), 316(5) read with 3(5), and 111(4) read with 3(5) of the BNS. Hiralal’s revision under Section 438 read with Section 442 BNSS challenged that order.

What Section 111 BNS demands

Section 111 of the BNS criminalises “organised crime.” It is the post-2023 successor to provisions like the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 and the Gujarat Control of Terrorism and Organised Crime Act, 2015. The Court reproduced the section in full and broke it into cumulative ingredients: the offence must be one listed in the section; the accused must be a member of an organised crime syndicate or act on its behalf; the syndicate’s activity must be a “continuing unlawful activity,” meaning the same person or syndicate must have been charge-sheeted more than once in the preceding ten years for a cognizable offence punishable with three years or more, with the competent court having taken cognisance of those charge-sheets; and the act must use violence, intimidation, threat, coercion or other unlawful means.

Justice Singh leaned heavily on a recent Himachal Pradesh High Court decision, Amrish Rana v. State of H.P. (2026:HHC:3356), which collected the major lines of authority on what “organised crime” means under analogous laws. Through that judgment, the Court worked through the Supreme Court’s rulings in State of Maharashtra v. Shiva @ Shivaji Ramaji Sonawane (2015) 14 SCC 272 and State of Gujarat v. Sandip Omprakash Gupta (2022 SCC OnLine SC 1727), the Karnataka High Court’s decision in Avinash v. State of Karnataka and the Kerala High Court’s ruling in Mohd. Hashim v. State of Kerala (2024 SCC OnLine Ker 5260). The common thread in those decisions is that the prior charge-sheet requirement is a hard condition, not a flexible one. The Court also referred to the J&K High Court’s reading in Aamir Bashir Magray (2025 SCC OnLine J&K 721).

The bench then applied a familiar canon of interpretation: penal statutes must be strictly construed, and where two reasonable readings are possible, the construction favouring the accused must be preferred — citing Tolaram Relumal v. State of Bombay and State of Jharkhand v. Ambay Cements. On that footing, the Court found that Section 111 BNS, being analogous to MCOCA, must be read with the same fidelity to its statutory pre-conditions.

NCRP complaints are not prior charge-sheets

Applying that framework to the facts, the Court drew a sharp line between two things the prosecution had conflated. The State’s case for invoking Section 111(4) rested on data drawn from the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal showing that 28 victims across 11 States had complained about the bank accounts and mobile numbers traced to Hiralal. But complaints registered on a portal — or even FIRs — are not charge-sheets. None of the 28 cases had reached the charge-sheet stage; they were “under investigation.” And the petitioner had no criminal antecedents at all: this was the first offence registered against him.

That left the State unable to clear the threshold the section imposes. Justice Singh held in plain terms that on the present record, the charges under Section 111(4) BNS were “not sustainable,” and the trial court had committed an error in framing them. Importantly, the Court did not foreclose future action. If the prosecution gathers material to satisfy the Section 111 threshold, it can move the trial court through further investigation and a supplementary report.

On the other charges, the petitioner did not get the same relief. Relying on P. Vijayan v. State of Kerala (2010) 2 SCC 398 and Sajjan Kumar v. CBI (2010) 9 SCC 368, the Court said the framing-of-charges stage requires only a prima facie sift of the evidence, not a probative weighing. The statement of Vinay Mewada, on its face, was enough to sustain charges under Sections 318(4) read with 3(5) and 316(5) read with 3(5) of the BNS. Those findings of the trial court were affirmed.

A redirection to Section 112 BNS

The most practically consequential part of the order is the direction the Court issued to the trial court. Section 112 of the BNS deals with “petty organised crime” and does not impose the same pre-condition of multiple prior charge-sheets. The Court asked the trial court to consider, after hearing both sides, whether Section 112 should be read into the proceedings, and to do so by a reasoned order on its own merits, uninfluenced by the High Court’s findings.

That route allows the case against Hiralal to retain an organised-fraud framing without straining Section 111’s text. Whether the trial court takes that path, and how the petitioner answers it, will shape the next phase of this prosecution.

Order

The criminal revision was partly allowed. The charges framed under Section 111(4) read with Section 3(5) of the BNS, 2023 against Hiralal were set aside. The charges under Sections 318(4) read with 3(5) and 316(5) read with 3(5) of the BNS were affirmed. The trial court was directed to consider the applicability of Section 112 BNS after hearing both sides and to pass a reasoned order. A copy of the order was directed to be sent to the trial court for information and necessary action.