Right now all the signs are pointing to the exchange owner as the culprit.
Multiple suspicious things occurred prior to this announcement. For example, withdrawals were disabled for all unverified users and those who tried to verify saw that the verification queue was severely backlogged. You could terminate your account but only receive BTC regardless of what other currency(s) you had stored (many users are reporting their accounts were terminated but did not receive any BTC).
Some users reported that there was a bug that caused deposits to be duplicated. Ex: Deposit 1 ETH and the transaction would show up twice in your account therefore making your balance 2 ETH which then you could withdraw successfully.
The problem in India is that everyone looks around and sees what industry is making the most money and jumps in there. I know a ton of people who have switched from textile to diamonds to construction and so on because their friend is doing well in that industry.
Similarly, now a large number of actual ponzi schemes have come up in this space (Bitconnect, Dekado, etc) and if you look at their websites it is very easy to tell (Dekado claims to use arbitrage buoyancy software to generate 1.5%+ return per day). The problem is logic doesn't apply here when your friend has made XYZ dollars in that coin. Greed gets the better of you and you invest knowing that it is not possible.
I agree snail-mailing needs a revamp. Their service would be interesting if I could use their API to send mail to an international country from the US and their edge centers sent it from within that international country. That way the mail would get there much faster than the traditional route.
We can reprogram our lines to make any type of PCBs and assemble them (we have inventory of most standard components).