Firstly thanks a lot for replying and adding to this aspect which we would mostly neglect or have at back of our mind until we are a victim. Thanks!
Reading such reports online, I see that even if the victims do not trade in derivatives or F&O themselves, the brokers/sub brokers/managers have done on their behalf on pretext of having approvals, mostly telephonic by bringing forward only part of calls or calls which do not present true picture. So I strongly feel that ourselves not engaging in trading, derivatives etc. will not safeguard us against unauthorized trading UNLESS we block this feature from our trading account - If at all that is possible? (I will try to find out)
F&O etc segments, the brokers can trade multi X the amount available. In reports, they have traded and brought to loss sufficient amount to empty the long term holdings of the victims. I am not sure why such products are encouraged by SEBI but rather should be slowly banned…most recently I got an email on covered calls where one can play 50X…although I never trade but what this means is that someone can do a 50X unauthorized trade on their victims - irrespective of whether they themselves Trade or not!!
Now coming to the two beautiful options that @gurjota has introduced us to - eDis & Freezing dmat shares - These can protect the DP from selling the victim’s shares BUT cannot protect from unauthorized Trades in F&O etc. It is only when the brokers who engage in such activities book loss and then they try to sell the victim’s holdings, they would not be able to…so in this case the brokers would go to court against the victim than vice versa. So in short chances are, they would not chose such a victim who has opted for eDis or DMAT freeze options as they would know that liquidating his/her assets would be a problem for them. So, this would be a slightly better problem to have for a victim and his/her chances of becoming a victim may also substantially go down.
The issue of unauthorized trade would still remain - unless there is option to completely block F&O, derivatives, intra day etc from our Trading accounts and use it only as an Investor delivery based account…If that is possible at DP level.
It is scary of thinking as a victim, but thats what we need to do in order to identify best approach other than manual checks…as there can be “n” number of reasons we may not be able to do those checks for things out of our control.