(HedgeCo.Net) Private credit sells itself on a simple promise: the underwriting is better. The pitch is that skilled lenders can originate deals banks won’t touch, structure them tightly, monitor them closely, and earn an illiquidity premium in return. But one of the most sobering stories in the market right now is about how that promise can break—quietly, procedurally, and at scale.
According to reporting on the episode, analysts at HPS Investment Partners—the private-lending specialist acquired by BlackRock in July 2024—uncovered that a more than $400 million credit exposure they had extended to a telecom entrepreneur was built on fraudulent invoices, fabricated customer confirmations, and fake email domains. The alleged scheme didn’t rely on exotic financial engineering. It relied on something far more unsettling: paperwork that looked ordinary enough to pass multiple checkpoints until one small inconsistency cracked the story open.
The case has become a live stress test for the industry’s underwriting standards—especially in fast-growing corners of private credit like asset-based finance and receivables-backed lending, where competition for yield can be intense and collateral is only as real as the data used to validate it.
The Deal at the Center of the Storm
The borrower, as described in the reporting, was telecom executive Bankim Brahmbhatt, linked to multiple entities—among them Carriox, which presented itself as operating in invoice factoring/receivables finance. Over time, HPS and lending partners grew their exposure to roughly $430 million (with some reports describing the problematic credit as a roughly $440 million deal), with portions reportedly co-financed and leveraged through other institutions, including BNP Paribas in a lending structure.
The loan was not sold as a moonshot. It lived in the world private credit knows well: a collateralized, document-heavy strategy designed to generate attractive income with controls that should reduce downside risk. The collateral, in essence, was supposed to be receivables—customer invoices that could be verified and enforced.
But the invoices—according to court filings and reporting—were not what they appeared to be.
How the Fraud Worked: Ordinary Documents, Extraordinary Deception
The alleged playbook was deceptively straightforward:
- Create invoices and contracts that look authentic.
- Produce customer confirmations that appear to validate those invoices.
- Route communications through fake or manipulated email addresses—domains designed to resemble legitimate counterparties.
- Feed the same “verified” package into a lending process that, by design, depends heavily on documentary validation.
In receivables-backed lending, the heart of diligence is confirming that (a) the customer is real, (b) the invoice is real, and (c) the customer acknowledges the obligation. If those confirmations are compromised—if the “customer” on the other end is effectively the borrower in disguise—then the collateral becomes theater.
The reporting suggests that’s what happened here: forged documents and confirmations were allegedly used to support a loan package large enough to materially hit specific funds when the truth emerged.
The Due Diligence That Didn’t Catch It
What makes the story resonate inside private markets is not that fraud exists—fraud always exists. It’s that the standard defenses appeared to be present:
- internal diligence and monitoring,
- third-party verification/audit work referenced in reporting (including firms named as part of the process),
- the typical machinery a large institutional lender deploys before writing a nine-figure check.
And yet the package still cleared.
This is the uncomfortable truth in modern private credit: as strategies expand into data-heavy collateral (receivables, invoices, supply-chain finance, merchant cash advance streams), validation increasingly depends on systems and communications that can be spoofed—unless lenders build truly independent verification rails.
The Tell That Broke the Case
In the account reported, the unraveling began with something mundane: an analyst noticed irregularities tied to email domains—small inconsistencies that didn’t match what legitimate counterparties should look like. That tiny “off” detail triggered deeper scrutiny, and the deeper scrutiny revealed that the confirmations underpinning the invoices were unreliable.
It’s an important point for allocators: many credit blowups don’t start with a dramatic market event. They start with a footnote in a dataset, a mismatch in documentation, a metadata anomaly—things that only matter if your process is designed to treat anomalies as signals rather than noise.
The Aftermath: Courts, Bankruptcy, and Investigations
Once the suspected fraud surfaced, HPS moved to court quickly, according to reporting, and the situation rapidly escalated beyond a workout into a legal and investigative matter. The borrower reportedly left the U.S. for India and later stopped responding, while related entities and the borrower himself ultimately filed for bankruptcy in August 2025. The FBI and federal prosecutors have been reported as investigating aspects of the case.
For HPS funds exposed to the deal, the financial impact was meaningful. Reporting indicates the investment was written down—ultimately to zero—hitting expected returns for certain vehicles and serving as a visible reminder that even diversified private credit platforms can take sharp idiosyncratic losses when collateral fails.
Why This Story Matters to the Entire $3 Trillion Private Credit Market
This is not just a single bad loan story. It lands at a moment when private credit is simultaneously:
- growing rapidly,
- moving into more complex asset-backed niches, and
- facing questions about underwriting discipline as competition increases.
The private-lending market in the U.S. has been described as roughly $3 trillion, and the structural worry is simple: when too much capital chases similar opportunities, the first thing that compresses is not pricing—it’s standards.
That is why this case has become a reference point in allocator conversations. It is a clean example of a failure mode that isn’t driven by macro spreads widening or rates jumping. It’s driven by information integrity—whether the collateral exists in the way the lender believes it exists.
The Bigger Lesson: Private Credit’s Edge Is Operational, Not Just Financial
Private credit doesn’t have daily price discovery. That’s often framed as a feature—less volatility, more stability. But the trade-off is that risk can migrate away from mark-to-market noise and into places that are harder to see:
- documentation quality,
- counterpartny validation,
- operational controls,
- fraud detection,
- and the independence of third-party verification.
In traditional syndicated credit, dozens of eyes and market pricing can expose weak credits quickly. In private credit—especially in specialized asset-based finance—your risk system is your market. When it fails, the first “price discovery” can be a zero.
What Allocators Will Ask Next
In the wake of cases like this, sophisticated LPs tend to push for clarity in a few areas:
- Verification independence: Are customer confirmations validated through channels the borrower cannot influence?
- Data provenance: Can the lender trace invoice and receivables data back to primary systems—not PDFs and email trails?
- Concentration limits: How big can any single borrower/structure get inside a fund before governance triggers step in?
- Early-warning design: Are anomalies escalated quickly, or normalized until it’s too late?
- Remedies and recovery: What protections exist when collateral turns out to be fictional?
The details vary by strategy, but the direction is consistent: allocators are increasingly treating operational controls as a return driver—not an administrative cost.
Bottom Line
The alleged fake-invoice scheme that ensnared a BlackRock-linked private credit unit is a high-impact reminder that private credit risk isn’t only about spreads and default cycles. It’s also about the integrity of information, the rigor of verification, and the ability of underwriting processes to withstand deception that looks ordinary.
For the private credit industry, the message is stark: as the market scales and competition intensifies, the winners won’t just be the firms that source deals. They’ll be the firms that build underwriting systems resilient enough to assume that documents can lie—and that “trust, but verify” must now mean verify independently, every time.