The teaser for the Hansal Mehta directed web-series, Scam 1992, featuring the life of Harshad Mehta has just been launched and does justice to the absolute terror of the man who single-handedly took the stock-market to a catastrophic downfall.

The show has been adapted from the book ‘The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away’ by journalist Sucheta Dalal and her husband Debashis Basu.

The 1992 scam was masterminded by Harshad Mehta, popularly known as the Amitabh Bachchan of the Indian stock market. This systemic bank fraud which used bank receipts and stamp paper caused the Indian Stock Market to crash, leading to a complete structural change of the security system of India.

The scam was allegedly worth over 1000 crores. According to reports, the scope of the scam was larger than the health budget and education budget of India. Making the price of stocks soar through fictitious practices, Mehta went and sold the stocks he owned in these companies. Featuring Pratik Gandhi, Shreya Dhanwanthary and Sharib Hashmi, Scam 1992 is set in the 1980’s & 90’s Bombay.

“This was the mother of all Indian financial scandals. It exposed the utter lawlessness and absence of supervision in the money markets; it allowed funds to be transferred with impunity from banks and corporate houses into the equity markets; and saw thousands of crores of bank funds to move in and out of brokers’ bank accounts in what was later claimed as “accepted market practice,” Dalal writes on her website.

“His relentless rigging of BPL, Videocon, and Sterlite shares ended with the inevitable collapse and a cover-up operation involving an illegal opening of the trading system in the middle of the night by the Bombay Stock Exchange officials. It cost the BSE President and Executive Director their jobs,” she adds.

Of the 27 criminal charges brought against Harshad Mehta, he was only convicted of four. He died in 2001 at the age of 47 due to a cardiac arrest.