In the early months of 2024, we have seen a lot of regulatory action from SEBI, RBI and other regulators. They have been issuing orders after orders against fraudulent or unregulated platforms who have been accepting large sums of money from retail investors. The biggest investigation in this space is on Growpital which was able to mobilize approx. 182 Crore worth of investments from retail investors like you and me. That investigation still continues so no comments on that. But we have seen similar orders on SharesBazaar AIF, CreditBulls and many others have been shut or have their accounts frozen.

I for one have been personally very happy that we never distributed any products from these platforms (even after getting offered very lucrative commissions) and even helped some of our fellow investors stay away from them saving them from any unnecessary defaults. But we also realize that we don't have the capacity to investigate into each and every platform. Not only that, sometimes you may have disputes with regulated platforms as well. For e.g. I have regularly see many people on Twitter (now X) complaint about their stock broker glitches and threating to file a complaint with SEBI.

But the common question amongst investors is How To Lodge a Complaint? I also had the same question till around 2017. In that year, I had to lodge my first complaint against my stock broker for not providing me the correct end of year reports due to tech glitches. Lodging a complaint worked wonders and issue resolved within 2 days for which I was chasing over last 2 weeks.

With the introduction of alternative investments now, products have become more complicated and the regulatory bodies have divided duties. Here is a list available on the Sachet Platform which is a RBI initiative.

I believe most of a retail investors complaint will under the 1st category of Mutual Funds, Stock Brokers, CIS or anything generally unregulated but collecting money from retail investors at large. For P2P however, because the license is NBFC-P2P, it will fall with RBI.

So let's look step by step on how you can lodge a complaint on SEBI SCORES Portal.

Step 1: Register on SEBI Scores

Goes without saying, initiate the registration process on SEBI Scores by providing some basic information.

Step 2: Login using your details

You will be shown the below page in general, if you have lodged any complaints in the past, you can see the references on this page, otherwise it will be blank.

Step 3: Complaint Registration

Before we get into this, note, before registering your complaint on SEBI Scores, you are expected to make every effort to try and resolve the issue with the entity you are complaining against. You are expected to upload evidence of such communication on this portal while making the complaint.

You can only file the complaint against the following entities mentioned below. If the entity you want to complaint against is not present in this list, maybe it doesn't fall under the remit of SEBI, you can recheck the Sachet Portal by RBI.

You can file complaint against any of the categories for multiple reasons but to give you an idea, the following situations can be considered as an example:

1. Your stockbroker has frequently had tech issues due to which you haven't been able to trade effectively and have faced a loss.

2. You have paid money to your debt broker (like Grip, Indiabonds, BondsIndia, etc) to buy some bonds but they have not transferred it to your demat within agreed timelines.

3. A RIA (Registered Investment Analyst) has given you a stock tip and charged you a fee without understanding your risk return profile.

4. You know someone has done insider trading and manipulated the market and want SEBI to investigate it properly.

5. You know someone is illegally running a Collective Investment Scheme and want to report it to SEBI. This is available under the "Other Entities Section"

6. And Many More....

For people who don't have the time to register and log in to SEBI Scores, here is what the Other Entities Option has on the portal:

Step 4: Fill in all the Personal Details

Fill in all the mandatory personal details and ensure your mobile number, email and address are accurate as sometimes SEBI sends you a letter regarding your investigations.

Step 5: Mention your Complaint Details

The first question the portal will always ask you is if you have tried to resolve your complaint with the entity itself, If you select NO, following question is asked:

If you select YES, the following details are asked, so I can't stress more on this that you need to try and resolve this with the entity first, otherwise SEBI may outright reject your complaint.

Mention your complaint in detail, attach your supporting documents if any, preferably of small size (less than 10MB) and in PDF format and hit Submit!

DONE, your complaint is submitted and you will receive a text and email from SEBI Scores within a few minutes confirming the receipt.

Step 6: Help SEBI with the Investigation

At this stage, SEBI will immediately assign a case officer for the complaint who will evaluate your case and if you have already made an attempt to resolve this complaint with the concerned entity and shared evidence of that in the portal, the case officer will speak to the concerned entity to check what has gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the query. If you didn't attempt to resolve the query with the entity first, the case officer will directly assign the case to the compliance officer within the company who will have around 30 days to respond to the complaint.

You can check the status of the complaint at any given time on the portal by entering the complaint number.

If you are not happy with the resolution, you can give feedback on the complaint which will be checked by the case officer.

Conclusion

That's it for this article, I hope this helps you in understanding the process of filing a complaint on SEBI Scores and other government portals available for the public. It is important for all of us to collectively fight against obviously fraudulent platforms who are interested in scamming people of their hard earned money. And I hope you do your part in staying away from such platforms and keeping the overall ecosystem safe and robust.

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Please note that this is an opinion blog and not official research advice. I am not a registered RIA in India. This blog aims to promote informed decision-making and does not discourage you from investing in any deals.

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