In today’s Finshots, we break down one of the wildest prop-trading blow-ups in recent times that ran on fake terminals, insane leverage and a whole lot of misplaced trust.

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Now, on to today’s story.

The Story

It begins in Surat, in a small office, where dozens of traders logged in every morning, convinced they were part of something big. They believed they were trading through a reputable broker terminal, getting special limits that normal retail traders could never access, and using a setup that looked institutional and efficient. For months, it worked like a charm. Until one random morning, the terminals simply stopped responding.

And to know the workings behind how this came to be, let’s take it from the top.

You see, this office, according to Moneycontrol’s reporting, belonged to a firm called Green Wall Enterprises. If you walked past it, you’d see Jainam Stock Broking’s boards everywhere. Everyone casually called it “the Jainam branch”. And nobody even questioned it. Because, well, who goes around checking if a board on the wall is fake? Except it was, and Jainam later clarified that they had absolutely nothing to do with Green Wall.

But here’s where things start to get interesting.

Behind Green Wall was a man, Darshan Joshi, known as DJ. DJ wasn’t a SEBI-registered stockbroker himself. Instead, he ran a Greater Noida–based firm called iTrade Associates that was closely linked to Green Wall. And he handled crores of rupees that traders sent him from Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Ranchi, Kolhapur, wherever. So he was basically operating as an agent for Green Wall. And people trusted him because he gave them something magical: crazy leverage. The kind where a ₹1 crore deposit turns into over ₹7 crore of trading firepower in the F&O (futures and options) markets.

But before we go further, let’s take a step back to understand how prop trading actually works.

In markets, this high-power betting usually happens through something called a proprietary trading desk, or a “prop desk”. It’s basically a special account that brokers use to trade their own money. Their money, their risk. It’s meant only for them, not for outsiders. And because it’s house money, brokers typically have more flexibility internally in terms of how much risk they want to take, how big the positions can be, and how fast they can move. This isn’t the kind of freedom a retail trader gets.

So the key point is that prop trading is strictly meant for a broker using its own capital, for its own benefit — not for outsiders looking to borrow leverage.

But that’s exactly what was happening at Green Wall Enterprises.

Some brokers found a way to quietly let outsiders trade through these prop accounts (something that is strictly prohibited) and earn from it on the side. And traders realised they could get monster leverage without the usual rules or paperwork. That way, both sides benefitted, and so, nobody asked too many questions. And that’s what led to a perfect little black-market trading system.

For instance, a trader would hand over ₹20–50 lakh to an agent like DJ. DJ would take the money to Green Wall, where the broker effectively gave the trader access to the broker’s prop trading limits, even though the trades were made in the broker’s name. In return, the broker earned interest, brokerage, and sometimes a profit share. DJ pocketed a commission. And the trader got massive leverage and freedom to trade without formal checks.

All this happened without any KYCs, contracts or client codes… at least not in the way a regular retail account would have them. But it didn’t matter, because profits kept coming in.

Until, in August, the key individuals behind Green Wall — Nimit Shah and Hiren Jadav, simply vanished. Terminals froze mid-trade and positions could not be squared off. And suddenly everyone realised the horrible truth: their money wasn’t in the official broking system to begin with. It was floating in informal channels or dummy trading accounts or private bank accounts, controlled by people who were no longer picking up calls. 

DJ claimed he was a victim too. Losses were first estimated at ₹5 crore… then ₹22 crore… then ₹40 crore… and eventually industry insiders said the number might be closer to ₹150 crore.

And the deeper investigators went, the uglier things looked. Green Wall’s collapse brought to light a wider ecosystem. In many of these prop-trading setups, brokers like Green Wall were showing outside traders as ‘employees’ on paper, issuing salary slips so they appeared as in-house staff during inspections. Thousands of fake NISM certificates were being floated around so traders could get ‘approved user’ IDs on prop terminals. Many traders genuinely believed this was a legit setup, and didn’t know they were breaking rules simply by logging in. In these arrangements, losses could be shifted onto such ‘employee accounts’, deposits withheld, and profit and loss updates sent through unofficial emails.

Moneycontrol even detailed a similar case in Mumbai, where traders lost around ₹1 crore and were allegedly threatened when they showed up to ask for refunds. And the worst part is that none of this technically appears in SEBI’s famous statistic that 91% of F&O traders lost money in FY25, because these trades didn’t originate from real client accounts in the first place. They happened outside the system, in the shadows.

So, what’s next, you ask?

For now, market regulator SEBI has stepped in and asked exchanges to investigate the misuse of prop-trading accounts, including who was actually sitting behind such terminals and how access in Surat got extended to traders in places like Delhi, Jodhpur and Kolhapur. The regulator is also pushing for tighter rules such as mandatory mapping of MAC (Media Access Control) and IP addresses, so investigators can precisely identify where trades were placed. Separately, its probe is expected to look at issues like fake certificates and roundabout money flows between brokers and related entities.

But the real question is how did so many people walk straight into this mess? How did something this obviously risky, this obviously informal, this obviously too-good-to-be-true feel normal to so many traders across so many cities?

And a big part of the answer lies in simple human psychology.

You see, markets amplify hope and fear. And above all, they amplify the belief that somewhere out there, someone is playing the game better than you. So when an agent whispers, “This is how the big traders operate”, it doesn’t feel like a warning but a secret. It feels like you’ve been handed an insider pass to a smarter, faster, more powerful way of making money. And once that feeling kicks in, the brain quietly switches off all the alarms.

And that’s the thing about shortcuts. They don’t announce themselves as shortcuts. They arrive disguised as opportunities: special limits, exclusive access, low margins, high confidence. They work beautifully, right up until the moment they don’t. And by the time you realise you were balancing on a thread, the thread has already snapped.

Most traders caught in this saga weren’t reckless gamblers. They were hopeful of better than normal returns too quickly. They saw people around them making money. And they assumed that if so many people were doing it, it had to be legitimate. It felt like they had discovered a clever trick that the rest of the world hadn’t figured out yet.

But as Warren Buffett loves to remind the world, there are no free lunches, especially in markets, where every extra ounce of return has a matching ounce of risk hiding in the shadows.

And that’s exactly where this whole saga lands. Because the real danger wasn’t just the fake terminals or the shady intermediaries. It was the illusion and the belief that traders were getting something the system wouldn’t normally give. Once that illusion felt real, everything else looked normal.

It’s a reminder that if your name isn’t on the trading account, if your money isn’t inside the regulated system, if the paperwork doesn’t exist, if the limits look magical, and if everything relies on “just trust me”, then you’re not trading. You’re sitting in a backroom casino.

So the next time anyone promises you such things, you know what to do. Run away as fast as you can, and don’t stop to negotiate!

Until then…

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