Update, October 2026 — The inquiry reported here led somewhere. Investigators concluded ringID was running a multi-level marketing scheme, put the sum taken in three months at hundreds of crore, and a director was arrested and remanded. What the investigation found is below the original article.
The BFIU, an agency responsible for investigating suspicious transactions, has also summoned the account details of Tiktok, Streamkar, Teen Patti, Treasure Hunt, Lucky Paisa and Cricket Stars mobile applications.
According to BFIU sources, a letter seeking the details of these platforms have been sent to all the banks recently.
The BFIU letter has asked banks to inform if there are any bank accounts belonging to ringID Distribution Limited and ringID BD Limited.
Tiktok, StreamKar, Teen Patti, Treasure Hunt, Lucky Paisa and Cricket Stars have also been asked to send opening forms, KYC profile forms and updated transaction details if they have any type of bank account under their names.
In the letter, the address of ringID Distribution was given as House 57 of Niketan area in the capital's Gulshan while the address of ringID BD was Khaja Tower in Mohakhali of the capital.
However, addresses of other platforms were not mentioned.
ringID, which follows a typical MLM model but calls itself a "community business", multiplies the number of its members, offering them Tk1,500 to Tk1,700 for adding a new member.
They pay students for viewing and sharing adverts, adding new members to ringID, selling its products and coin transactions.
Lured by hefty earning offers, existing members assemble their family members, friends and acquaintances on ringID platform.
Under the brand promoter of community jobs, ringID now offers two types of memberships – Silver and Gold.
For a Silver category membership, ringID charges Tk12,000 and gives an option to earn Tk250 per day by watching 50+ advertisements. For a gold membership, it takes Tk22,000 and gives an option to earn Tk500 each day by watching 100+ ads.
ringID, a social networking platform designed and developed by Ring Inc. and located in Montreal, Quebec in Canada, was incorporated in 2016.
Background
The Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit's letter went out in the same weeks as the Evaly collapse, and for a related reason: money was leaving the country through apps that took payments from users while offering no product. ringID had been signing up members for "community jobs" that paid for watching advertisements, in exchange for a deposit, a structure that consumer groups called a pyramid scheme; Streamkar, Teen Patti and the others on the list were live-streaming and card-game apps that sold virtual coins through mobile financial services.
What happened next
Updated September 2026. In October 2021 police arrested ringID officials in Dhaka over the deposit scheme, and Bangladesh Bank froze the company's accounts; the app's payment features never reopened in Bangladesh. The BTRC blocked several of the gambling-style apps, and mobile financial services were told to stop processing payments to unlicensed gaming platforms. TikTok, which was on the list only for its bank details, continued to operate and later opened a creator portal for Bangladeshi users. The episode is why bKash and Nagad now ask merchants for a licence before enabling payments.
What the investigation found
Investigators described ringID as a multi-level marketing fraud rather than a social platform with a payments problem. Money was collected through electronic transactions, and the operation sold gold coins through an unauthorised MLM business, promising users an online income.
Estimates of the amount taken in April, May and June alone range from Tk212 crore to Tk302 crore across different reports — a spread worth noting rather than smoothing over, since the figure depended on which bank statements had been reconciled at the time.
Bangladesh Bank was asked to freeze ringID's accounts to stop the money leaving the country. A director, Saiful Islam, was arrested in Gulshan after a complaint filed by an aggrieved user at Bhatara Police Station under the Digital Security Act and the Multi-Level Marketing Control Act, and a Dhaka court placed him on a two-day remand. Several other officials and agents were named. The founders, Sharif Islam and Irene Islam, are Bangladeshi expatriates based in Canada.
Why the request for bank details was the significant step
The 2021 article records a financial intelligence unit asking for account information. That sounds procedural, and it is the most consequential thing that happened in the sequence.
A scheme of this kind is invisible from the product. ringID looked like a social app; the fraud was in the flow of money between users, agents and the operator, and it was only legible in bank statements. Content moderation, app store review and user complaints could not have surfaced it — reconciling deposits against payouts could, and did.
That is the general lesson, and it applies to every "earn online" platform anywhere. The question that distinguishes a business from a scheme is never what the app does. It is where the money paid to existing users comes from. If it comes from new users rather than from revenue, the arithmetic has a fixed endpoint regardless of how the app is marketed.
The part that did not resolve
Founders resident abroad. Freezing domestic accounts stops further outflow but does not recover what has already gone, and extradition in financial cases is slow and uncertain. It is the same structural gap that ran through the e-commerce collapses of the same period: domestic enforcement reaches domestic assets, and the people who designed the scheme are frequently not in the country by the time anyone is arrested.
