Lost parents saving in market

I am a 23-year-old male. When I was 18, I heard about the stock market and thought anyone could make money there. At that time, I had just passed 12th, and I didn’t have any money because I wasn’t working, and my family is lower middle class.

Around that time, LIC was listing on NSE, so I thought I could double my money through the IPO. I convinced my mother to buy one lot of the IPO for ₹15,000. After some time, I again convinced her to give me ₹15,000, promising that I would return ₹20,000 in two months.

I applied for the LIC IPO, but after 15–20 days, I didn’t get the allotment. Everything was fine until then. Meanwhile, I learned about intraday trading and started trading stocks. Within one month, I lost around ₹3,000.

Now my mother was asking for the money, but since I had already lost some of it, I told her I would return it after one year with interest. She agreed. Within 2–3 months, I lost all the remaining money.

At that time, I had access to my mother’s bank account, which had ₹30,000. I took ₹15,000 from it and started trading in Futures & Options (F&O). One day, I made a profit of ₹3,000, and I felt very happy. I thought I could recover everything and didn’t need a job if I kept making ₹2,000 daily.

But within five days, I lost ₹8,000. Then one day, I made a profit of ₹12,000, so I was in profit overall and happy again. I started thinking the same way—but soon I lost that money too.

At that point, I believed I just needed more money to recover everything.

After about a year, my mother sold a buffalo and had ₹1,00,000 in cash. She gave me that money to deposit in my father’s bank account. I lied and told her that I had deposited it and put it in an FD. Instead, I kept the money.

I deposited that money into my account and started trading again. I put some money into Zerodha, some into Exness for forex trading, and some into crypto trading.

In the Indian market, leverage is low, but in forex, there is up to 2000x leverage. I traded for around 1 to 1.5 years and lost all that money.

After that, whenever my parents saved some money, I would secretly withdraw it and trade it—losing it in forex, F&O, crypto, or prop firms.

Now, up to today, I have lost around ₹4,00,000 of my parents’ savings. I am not working. I recently started video editing, but I am not earning yet—I am just building my portfolio.

Now I don’t know how to tell them. I am extremely scared, and I have been stressed all these years. I want to change my life now, but I don’t know what to do.