the lead-up to the fraud. In this settlement process, deliveries of securities and payments were made through the broker. That is, the seller handed over the securities to the broker, who passed them to the buyer, while the buyer gave the cheque to the broker, who then made the payment to the seller. In this settlement process, the buyer and the seller might not even know with whom they had traded, either being known only to the broker. This the brokers could manage primarily because by now they had become market makers and had started trading on their account. To keep up a semblance of legality, they pretended to be undertaking the transactions on behalf of a bank. Mehta used forged BRs to gain unsecured loans, and used several small banks to issue BRs on demand. Once these fake BRs were issued, they were passed on to other banks and the banks in turn gave money to Mehta, mistakenly believing that they were lending against government securities. This money was used to drive up the prices of stocks in the stock market. When time came to return the money, the shares were sold for a profit and the BR was retired. The money due to the bank was returned. This went on as long as the stock prices rose, and no one knew about Mehta's operations. Once the fraud was exposed, though, many banks were left holding worthless BRs – the banking system had been swindled out of a whopping . They knew that they would be accused if people discovered his involvement in issuing cheques to Mehta. Subsequently, it transpired that Citibank, brokers like Pallav Sheth and Ajay Kayan, industrialists like Aditya Birla, Hemendra Kothari, a number of politicians, and the RBI Governor S.Venkitaramanan all had allowed or facilitated Mehta's market manipulation. In popular culture Books Mehta's life and his 1992 scam are covered in great detail by Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu in their book The Scam: from Harshad Mehta To Ketan Parekh. Films and television Scam 1992, streaming on SonyLIV and produced by Applause Entertainment is based on his life, which was inspired from Sucheta Dalal's book The Scam. Actor Pratik Gandhi played Mehta. It is one most highly rated television shows in the world on IMDb. The character Natwar Shah in movie Aankhein (1993), placed under scanner for a multi-crore scandal, was inspired by Harshad Mehta.