In Mumbai, builder fraud has a specific geography: the redevelopment project. The city’s Economic Offences Wing files its biggest recent builder FIRs not against greenfield townships but against slum-rehabilitation and society-redevelopment schemes — projects where residents hand over the one asset they own against a promise of a better one.
The 2026 case files
Three matters from the EOW’s recent files show the pattern.
In the largest, the EOW registered an FIR against RRD Heights & Builders Pvt Ltd and its directors, alleging a wrongful loss of Rs 77.80 crore on a Slum Rehabilitation Authority project at Nahur Village, Mulund West. The complaint alleges the company failed to honour memorandums of understanding executed across 2010, 2016 and 2018 — an eight-year paper trail before the FIR.
In Bandra East, an FIR alleges fraud of Rs 11.51 crore involving 19 flats in a slum-rehabilitation project. And at the One Jogeshwari SRA project in Behram Baug, the EOW arrested a builder for allegedly selling flats in the rehabilitation component unlawfully — units meant for slum residents, sold into the open market.
All of these are allegations at FIR stage; none has been tried. But the common thread is structural. In an SRA project the residents’ consent, the developer’s entitlement to sell “free-sale” flats, and the rehabilitation obligation are all defined on paper — and each of these FIRs alleges the paper said one thing while the money did another.
HDIL and the bank that fell with it
Mumbai is also home to the case where a builder’s borrowing took down a bank. In 2019, the EOW arrested the promoters of Housing Development and Infrastructure Limited (HDIL) and senior officials of Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank in a case the FIR valued at over Rs 4,355 crore. The allegation: loans to the HDIL group — ultimately around 73 per cent of the bank’s entire loan book — were kept out of the bank’s reported non-performing accounts, hidden from the RBI, until the structure collapsed. Properties worth more than Rs 3,500 crore were attached in the investigation.
The depositors’ side of that story ended in a rescue: PMC Bank was amalgamated into Unity Small Finance Bank with effect from January 2022, and by April 2022 Unity reported paying about Rs 3,800 crore to roughly 8,50,000 depositors under the scheme. The criminal case continues. For homebuyers the lesson is uncomfortable but useful: a builder’s finances are not the buyer’s problem until suddenly they are, and the warning signs — a builder borrowing from every available source, projects mortgaged several times over — are visible in public records before a collapse.
What MahaRERA’s numbers say about recovery
Maharashtra’s regulator publishes what almost no one else does: how much of the money it orders returned actually comes back.
By mid-2025, MahaRERA had issued recovery warrants worth about Rs 724 crore against developers who defied its refund orders — 1,163 warrants across the state. The amount actually recovered by then: roughly Rs 200 crore, from 283 warrants covering 139 projects. That is about a third, recovered through the district collectors’ offices, which execute RERA warrants as land-revenue arrears.
Read the number both ways. A third recovered means two-thirds still outstanding — a RERA order is not a cheque. But Rs 200 crore returned to Maharashtra homebuyers through a regulator’s process, without a single court case filed by the buyers themselves, is also the most effective state-level recovery machinery in the country, and MahaRERA has pushed lapsed-registration projects to revive or refund, coordinating enforcement through 13 collectorates.
The Mumbai buyer’s playbook
- Before paying anything: verify the project on maharera.maharashtra.gov.in — registration, sanctioned plans, quarterly progress updates, and whether the registration has lapsed. In an SRA or society redevelopment, ask for the development agreement and check who holds the right to sell which component.
- Delay or diversion in a registered project: file at MahaRERA. If you win a refund order and the builder does not pay, ask for the recovery warrant — the collector executes it.
- Cheating, forgery, unlawful sales: the Economic Offences Wing, through your police station or the EOW directly. The RRD Heights matter shows the EOW acts on documented MoU trails.
- Consumer route: edaakhil.nic.in; helpline 1915.
- Collective action: 100 allottees, or 10% of a project’s buyers, can take a builder to the NCLT as financial creditors.
For how these routes fit together nationally, see the enforcement map. For the region where the courts went furthest, read the Delhi NCR record.
Sources and attribution
The enforcement facts on this page are taken from public records: court and tribunal orders, FIRs registered by investigating agencies, attachment and arrest communications of the Directorate of Enforcement, orders and published figures of state real-estate regulatory authorities, and police communications as reported. Where this page describes a finding of a court, it is a finding. Where it describes an FIR, a prosecution complaint, an attachment or a regulator’s allegation, it is an accusation or an interim measure — not a conviction, and not a determination of guilt.
A note on names
Companies are named on this page only as they appear in public orders, FIRs or official releases, with that attribution. No individual is named. Where a company shares part of its name with other, unrelated businesses, nothing on this page refers to those unrelated businesses.
Right of reply
Every company named on this page is invited to respond. If any figure, date, name or description here is inaccurate, write to us with the correcting document and we will publish the correction, or the response in full, alongside this article without charge and without editing its substance.
No recovery agents
Cases like these attract people offering, for a fee, to recover stuck money. No government agency charges a victim to be treated as a victim, and no private service can release money attached by a court. Use the official channels listed above. Oquilia takes no fee from readers, offers no recovery service, and refers no one to any legal practice.
Source
Supreme Court and NCLAT orders; CBI, ED and EOW communications; UP-RERA, MahaRERA and GujRERA orders and published figures; police FIRs as officially reported