What is SCORES

The plain answer

SCORES, the SEBI Complaint Redressal System, is SEBI’s online complaint portal at scores.sebi.gov.in. You register, lodge a complaint against a SEBI-regulated entity, and the system routes it to that entity with SEBI oversight until it closes. The name spells out what it is: a complaint system run by the regulator, not a court, not a lawyer’s channel, and not a paid service. It is free, it tracks everything online, and it is the final rung in the investor’s escalation ladder.

The current version of SCORES launched in 2024 and replaced the older portal, which closed on 28 March 2024. Complaints now arrive at the entity electronically with a fixed response clock, and every status change is visible in your dashboard. The old portal’s lesson, complaints sent by email were simply not entertained, still applies: the portal is the only route, which is also what makes the tracking work.

SCORES works best when the earlier rungs of the ladder have already been climbed. The portal itself instructs you to first take the grievance to the entity concerned. A SCORES complaint with prior correspondence attached moves faster than a cold one, because the entity is answering a documented history rather than a new story.

In the rare case you cannot reach a person at all, SCORES still accepts the complaint and routes it electronically, which is the system’s answer to the silent desk. The portal is not a prize for having climbed the ladder perfectly; it is the rung that works even when the ones below it did not.

What SCORES covers

SCORES handles complaints against the entities SEBI regulates: stockbrokers, depository participants, mutual funds, portfolio managers, investment advisers, research analysts, listed companies and the market infrastructure institutions such as exchanges and depositories. If your grievance concerns anything an intermediary did or failed to do, wrong charges, unauthorised debits, a transfer that stalled, an app fault that cost you money, a grievance officer who never replied, it belongs on the ladder that ends here.

The complaint can also target listed companies, which makes SCORES wider than most investors assume. A dividend that was declared but never paid, a share certificate that a company refuses to acknowledge, an investor communication that never arrived: these sit on the same portal, routed to the company instead of a broker. The selection is made when you lodge the complaint, by choosing the entity and the complaint category.

The scope has hard edges too. Suggestions and feedback are not complaints. Matters already before a court, or already inside the Online Dispute Resolution mechanism, are not taken up as fresh complaints, because the system does not run parallel proceedings. And the portal only entertains complaints through its own forms, which is why the filing section below matters more than the rest of this page put together.

One exclusion trips up new investors more than the others: a loss on your investments is not a complaint. If a share you bought fell because the market fell, SCORES has nothing to route, because no regulated entity failed you. The portal handles service failures: money that did not arrive, shares that did not move, charges that were not authorised, replies that never came. The distinction is between what the market did to your portfolio and what an intermediary did to your account, and SCORES only hears the second.

The escalation ladder

The ladder has four rungs, and each rung exists to document the next one. Climbing it in order is not bureaucracy; it is how a complaint acquires the written history that makes each later rung resolve faster:

• Rung one: the intermediary’s grievance officer.Every broker and depository participant publishes a grievance contact. Write the complaint, send it, and keep the acknowledgment. This starts the clock and creates the paper trail.
• Rung two: the relevant institution. Trading issues go to the exchange’s investor grievance desk; holdings and demat issues go to the depository. Both publish grievance addresses and both respond in writing, which becomes the second document in the file.
• Rung three: SCORES. If the first two rungs produced nothing or an unsatisfactory answer, file on the portal with the correspondence attached. The complaint now carries its own history.
• Rung four: review and beyond. Inside SCORES, two review levels sit between the entity’s answer and SEBI’s own examination. Outside SCORES, the ODR mechanism and the courts remain open after the grievance closes.

One exception matters in practice: unauthorised transactions, frauds and missing assets justify skipping rungs. If your shares moved without your TPIN, or money left your account without your instruction, document everything and file on SCORES immediately while also raising it with the broker. Speed protects the money trail, and SCORES accepts the complaint while the investigation runs.

How long you wait at each rung is your judgment, but two habits keep the ladder moving. First, set a calendar reminder for your own follow-up, roughly two weeks after each written complaint, so silence never gets to run. Second, treat a partial or evasive response the same as silence: a reply that does not address your stated request closes nothing, and it becomes the next attachment when you climb to the following rung. The ladder is climbed fastest by people who treat non-answers as answers.

Filing a complaint

Filing runs in four steps, and none of them requires a lawyer or a fee:

• Register on the portal. Create your account at scores.sebi.gov.in with basic identification details. The registration is the same for every entity you may ever complain against.
• Select the entity and category. Pick the broker, DP, fund house or company, and the complaint category that fits. The routing depends on this selection, so choose the entity whose conduct you are complaining about.
• Write the complaint with dates. State what happened, when, and what you asked for. The writing section below is the template for this step.
• Attach the documents. Contract notes, ledger extracts, emails, the prior complaint acknowledgments. The documents are the case; the text is just its index.

For complaints against an Authorized Person, select the broker the AP is attached to, and name the AP in the complaint text. The AP acts under the broker’s supervision, and the broker is the regulated entity that must answer for the conduct. The portal routes by regulated entity, not by the individual who happened to serve you.

Before you open the portal, spend ten minutes building the file. Put every relevant document in one folder with dates in the filenames, write the timeline as plain lines in a note, and check that you have your account details, your BO ID, your client ID and the entity’s registered name, at hand. The portal session then becomes a matter of copying the timeline into the form and attaching the folder’s contents, which takes minutes instead of an afternoon.

Writing a complaint that resolves

A SCORES complaint is a timeline with a request, nothing more. Open with one sentence identifying the account and the entity. Then list the events as dated lines: on this date this happened, on that date I wrote, on this date I received that reply. End with one sentence stating the resolution you are asking for, whether that is a reversal, a transfer, a refund or an investigation.

Every claim in the timeline needs its document. If you say a debit was unauthorised, attach the CAS or the debit confirmation. If you say you wrote twice, attach both emails. The entity’s response is written against your attachments, and a claim without its document gets the weakest possible answer: a request for the document, which costs you a full response cycle.

Tone matters for speed, not for correctness. The complaint is read by a grievance desk that processes many per day, and the fastest path to their action list is a plain statement of what is wrong and what you want. Anger belongs in a phone call, not in the file. The file is a record, and records read best when they are flat.

Write it once, then cut it in half. Read the draft and delete every sentence that restates an attachment, because the attachment already says it. What survives the cut is the complaint: the events, the dates and the request, nothing else. The portal accepts long text, but the desk reads short text, and the desk is where the resolution happens.

Common complaints, mapped

The fastest complaints are the ones that arrive with the right documents already attached. Here is how five common grievances map to the portal:

• Unauthorised demat debit. Name the broker, state the date and the scrip, and attach the CAS entry or the debit confirmation from the depository. The question the file must answer is: where is your TPIN authorisation for this debit.
• Wrong charges in a contract note. Attach the contract note and the broker’s published schedule, and state which line item differs from the schedule by how much. The arithmetic is the complaint.
• A transfer that stalled. Attach the transfer request, the acknowledgment and the CAS showing the debit did not complete. The timeline tells the grievance desk where the process stopped.
• IPO application or refund stuck. Attach the application reference and the bank statement. Refund and allotment complaints route to the broker or the registrar, whichever the portal identifies for the category.
• Grievance officer silent. Attach your earlier emails with their dates. This is the complaint where the prior rungs matter most, because the file proves the silence.

In every row the pattern repeats: the document proves the event and the text states the correction you want. A complaint built this way gives the entity’s desk almost nothing to ask for, which means its 21-day clock is spent answering, not requesting.

What happens after you file

The system routes the complaint to the entity automatically, and the clock starts. The entity must submit its Action Taken Report, the written answer to your complaint, within 21 days of receiving it. In practice the averages run far faster: recent months have seen most reports submitted within a week. Either way, the deadline is a deadline, and the status is visible on the portal throughout.

The review levels are the part most investors never use, and they are the reason the system has teeth. If the entity’s answer does not satisfy you, you can seek a first-level review within 15 days, which sends the complaint to a designated body for fresh examination. Unhappy with that too? A second-level review within another 15 days puts the matter in front of SEBI itself. Each level re-examines the file you built, which is why the attachments from the first complaint keep working for you.

SEBI also publishes monthly data on SCORES disposals, and the tracking is the system’s real power: a complaint inside SCORES cannot be silently dropped, because the delay shows on the portal. When the complaint closes, you get 15 days to submit feedback on the outcome, which becomes part of the record too.

Read the Action Taken Report for substance, not length. A real ATR states what was investigated, what the records showed, and what was done or refused, with reasons. A hollow ATR says the matter is resolved without saying what changed. If the ATR does not answer your stated request, use the first-level review within the 15-day window, because that window is strict and a missed deadline means accepting the answer you did not want.

What SCORES cannot do

SCORES administers the regulator’s grievance channel. It does not decide investment disputes, it does not award damages or compensation like a court, and it does not punish the entity on your behalf. What it does is force an answer, on a clock, with a record, under the regulator’s view. The difference matters when you choose what to ask for: ask SCORES for a resolution of the service failure, not for a damages award.

Some matters are excluded by design. Suggestions and general feedback are not complaints. Matters already sub judice, already inside the ODR mechanism, or already closed on the old portal cannot be reopened as fresh complaints. And disputes with entities SEBI does not regulate, an unregistered advisory channel, a random social media tipster, fall outside the portal entirely, because there is no regulated entity to route them to.

For monetary disputes, the designed path is SEBI’s Online Dispute Resolution mechanism, where exchanges and depositories refer disputes between investors and intermediaries to independent ODR institutions. SCORES and ODR run in parallel lanes: SCORES chases the regulatory answer, ODR chases the settlement, and neither blocks the courts if it comes to that.

Behind the individual case sits the regulator’s own use of the data. A complaint that closes against an intermediary becomes part of that intermediary’s complaint record, and repeated complaints of the same kind are exactly the pattern SEBI looks at when it inspects entities and when it acts against them. Your complaint therefore does two jobs: it resolves your case, and it leaves a mark in the record the regulator reads.

What people usually get wrong

Questions people ask

Sources

• Securities and Exchange Board of India. “SCORES: SEBI Complaint Redressal System.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Securities and Exchange Board of India. “Legal framework — circulars.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Securities and Exchange Board of India. “Legal framework — regulations.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Economic Times. “SEBI clears over 5,000 investor complaints through SCORES in June.” Accessed 16 August 2026.