Hundreds of customers of the Goodwin jewellery chain were left high and dry after it shut its outlets in Maharashtra as the police moved to issue lookout notices against the company owners accused of cheating people of several crores through their schemes.

As nervous customers gathered outside some of the closed outlets in Thane and Palghar districts to seek refund of their investments, a video surfaced on social media showing the jewellery chain owners purportedly telling affected people that their money was "safe" and promised to return it. The firm's owners and whole-time directors, A M Sunilkumar and A M Sudheshkumar, both brothers hailing from Kerala, were untraceable, police officials said on Monday.

In the video, Sunilkumar and Sudheshkumar, speaking in Malayalam (most of the customers are people from Kerala living in Maharashtra), said they have not fled the country. The Thane Police is the process of issuing lookout notices against the owners of Goodwin Jewellers, they said. The fraud comes close on the heels of the multi-crore scam at Mumbai-based PMC Bank, which has affected thousands of depositors.

The police in Palghar district on Monday also booked the jewellery firm owners under the Maharashtra Protection of Interests of Depositors in Financial Establishments (MPID) Act, which has provisions for stringent action against those cheating customers. In the video, Sunilkumar and Sudheshkumar urged customers to have "faith" in them and claimed there was a "calculative move by some forces" to defame them and make their business suffer.

"We are examining the video," senior inspector S P Aahera, from Dombivali police station in Thane, said. Goodwin Jewellers shut its outlets in Thane, Palghar and the Mumbai region a couple of days before Diwali, leaving hundreds of people, who had invested in their gold and fixed deposit schemes, in the lurch.