A House of Cards: How a web of deceit undid unicorn Gameskraft

The allegations come amid a churn of executive directors, questions over the role of its auditor, and the government’s recent ban on real-money gaming.

Between 2021 and 2022, four executive directors resigned from the company’s board within months of joining. One quit within a month. This includes Rajesh Lohia and Umesh Kumar Ram. The two had took office on 8 March 2021 and were joined by another individual just seven months later in October.

“There have been activities which have been carried out by the promoters and their associates, team and others because of which I have no say, and hence I would like to tender my resignation with immediate effect," Lohia and Ram wrote in separate, but identical, resignation letters to Gamekraft’s board of directors.

A third director, Nitin Kumar, resigned on 12 December 2021, just 33 days after joining the board. On 23 December 2021, a fourth director, Abhishek Upadhyay, joined the board. Upadhyay, a 27-year-old from Uttar Pradesh, quit the board eight months later in August 2022.

The four former directors did not respond to requests for comment. Queries to Gameskraft co-founders also did not elicit a response.

“Gameskraft is and will provide all support to the authorities investigating this matter. As the matter is under investigation by the authorities, we cannot comment any further on this topic," said a spokesperson for Gameskraft.

Once Prabhu allegedly admitted to siphoning money from the company’s bank account in an email dated 5 March 2025, he was sacked by the company.

Meanwhile, the company’s chief executive officer Vikas Taneja and co-founder and chief operating officer Divya Alok Agarwal also stepped down from the board and resigned from the company this July.

One of the co-founders, Prithvi Singh, has taken over as the CEO of the company.

Taneja and Agarwal did not respond to queries on the reason behind their resignations.

According to an executive privy to the developments, soon after the board received the “purported email" sent from a non-official account of Prabhu on 5 March, Gameskraft enlisted Trilegal, a law firm. Trilegal also engaged Grant Thornton to do a forensic analysis and conduct interviews with individuals. Subsequently, the law firm submitted a report to the board, following which Gameskraft decided to file a police complaint against Prabhu on 9 September.

The board of Gameskraft now includes two people, co-founders Prithvi Raj Singh and Deepak Singh. Gameskraft counts Prithvi Singh, Deepak Singh Ahlawat, Raj Kumar Taneja, Sindhi Devi Jha and Divya Alok Agarwal as its five co-founders. Together, they owned 86.31% as of the end of March 2024, as per the latest available shareholding data filed by the company. Eight angel investors owned 9.67%. Two former employees owned 3.24%. Finally, Gameskraft’s ESOP Trust owned 0.78%.

There are clear red flags on the quality of the company's financial audits. Between 2019 and 2025, Prabhu siphoned off over ₹250 crore from the company’s bank account with RBL Bank, as per the first information report filed by Bengaluru police. He falsified bank statements and mutual fund statements to mislead the company into believing that the money had been withdrawn from the bank and invested.

An executive, on the condition of anonymity, said Gameskraft works with four banks, including RBL. It has multiple bank accounts with each of the four banks.

Auditors under scrutiny

Gameskraft’s statutory auditor signed off on its financial statements, including these allegedly falsified bank statements and mutual fund investment statements, which experts have flagged. The auditors did not follow due process in confirming these statements directly with the bank and mutual fund, they said.

“As a part of statutory audit, external confirmations are required to be obtained by the statutory auditor as such evidence is independent and obtained directly from a reliable source," said Gaurav Pingle, a practising company secretary.

Gururaja Sridhara, the partner from MDA & Co who signed off on the books of Gameskraft, declined to comment. “As the matter is under investigation by the law enforcement authorities, we cannot comment on this subject. MDA & Co. shall cooperate with the authorities investigating this matter," Sridhara said in an email response to a detailed questionnaire sent by Mint.

An email sent to Nitin Gupta, chair of the National Financial Reporting Authority, asking whether the regulatory body for auditors would probe this episode went unanswered.

Experts also flagged internal processes at the company, which allowed Prabhu to single-handedly control the bank account. A simple maker-checker process, a standard practice in companies, could have prevented the fund diversion. Under the maker-checker system, a dual-verification workflow is employed, where a maker initiates a transaction and then an independent checker reviews and approves it to prevent errors or fraud. This was missing at Gameskraft, according to an executive privy to the development.

“The Gameskraft episode feels eerily reminiscent of the Satyam saga," said V. Balakrishnan, a former chief financial officer at Infosys Ltd and founder of Exfinity Ventures, a venture capital fund. “Concentrated power in the hands of a few, falsified documents, and a glaring absence of independent verification by auditors were the hallmarks of that earlier scandal, and it is disheartening to see history repeat itself," he said.

Balakrishnan said he was astounded that such a fraud could have continued unchecked for five years. It reflects poorly on the auditors, the management, and the board, he said. “One can only hope that regulators act decisively and set a strong precedent to ensure such breaches of trust are never allowed to recur."

Prabhu could not be reached for a comment.

The company’s co-founders and investors made money.

Gameskraft spent ₹334 crore last year on share repurchases, marking the third buyback after the company spent ₹689 crore in 2023-24 and ₹128.31 crore in 2020-21, according to disclosures filed by the company with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Together, Gameskraft has distributed ₹1,151 crore to its seven individual investors and to many employees who will own shares under the Gameskraft ESOP Trust.

Gameskraft reported ₹3,895.99 crore of revenue last year, a12% increase. However, profitability declined by 25% to ₹705.82 crore, primarily due to an increase in other expenses.

Only last year, in an interview, Prabhu had exuded confidence about Gameskraft.

“This is also a point people have started talking about us," the man in the eye of the storm, Prabhu, had said in a November video interview done by The Economic Times Brand Equity. “Till date, the focus of the company has not been on PR and media attention," he had said.

Today, people are surely talking about Gameskraft and Prabhu. But not in the manner Prabhu or the company’s founders would have wanted.