Zerodha investor alleges Rs 5 crore withdrawal cap on Rs 18 crore balance. Nikhil Kamath responds: 'Dr...'

A Mumbai-based investor, Dr Aniruddha Malpani, accused leading online broker Zerodha of running a “scam” after he claimed he could not withdraw more than RS 5 crore from his account despite having a withdrawable balance of approximately Rs 18.46 crore.

Dr Malpani, an IVF specialist and angel investor, shared screenshots of his Zerodha dashboard on the social platform X (formerly Twitter). The images displayed a total account value of Rs 42.9 crore, a used margin of about Rs 24.46 crore, and the stated withdrawable balance.

In his post he wrote: “The Zerodha scam! They don’t allow me to withdraw my own money from their account, saying the daily limit for withdrawal is Rs 5 crores. They use my money for free!”

Screenshot images posted by Dr Malpani included a message from the Zerodha app stating, “A maximum of Rs 5 crores can be withdrawn per day. For instant withdrawals the request must be between Rs 100 and Rs 2,00,000 per day. The withdrawal limit is subject to the availability of withdrawable balance in the trading account.”

In response, Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath confirmed that Dr Malpani’s payout requests had been processed. He explained that the Rs 5 crore threshold is a protective measure, stating: “Hi Dr, your payout requests were processed yesterday. We need to ensure, for the sake of our systems’ sanity (like all other financial services firms), that we have some checks in place when clients withdraw funds. As you can imagine, numerous potential issues can arise during the withdrawal process, and once funds are paid out, there is no way for us to recover them. Hence, Rs 5 crore is the threshold at which we ask customers to create tickets to withdraw.”