Today, along with keeping oneself safe from the coronavirus, one has to be mindful of cybercriminals. These criminals are especially targeting users taking the digital route to conduct financial transactions.
One of the channels seeing a rise in frauds is the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a digital payment platform that facilitates cashless, real-time transactions via mobile phones.
UPI or Unified Payment Interface is a method to make payments digitally and is rapidly gaining popularity. This method is a comparatively recent entrant into the digital payments space as compared to other methods such as NEFT, IMPS, mobile wallets and so on.
According to a report on The BBC News Africa, UPI has hit a landmark of one billion transactions in September. In addition to that, UPI has recently crossed 100 million users.
As the methods of making payments have become technologically advanced, fraudsters have also evolved different ways to scam you out of your hard earned money.
- Types of frauds
Banks are now regularly sending emails and SMSs to their customers educating them on how the UPI based scam works and what they should do to avoid being scammed.
According to the email sent by the bank to its customers, fraudsters ask customers to share their debit card details, forward text messages, share UPI registration one-time password (OTP) etc. over the phone. They use this data to create a new virtual payment address (VPA) ID for your account and set an MPIN to do the transactions. At times, fraudsters ask customers to click unverified links etc. over text messages.
It is also observed that has there are some apps that asks for regular privacy permissions, it is capable of acquiring full access to your smartphone remotely and would let fraudsters carry out banking transactions remotely.”
Now some of this apps are legitimate app which can be used as remote desktop software tool, which provides a third party a complete view of the user’s screen. Scamsters just use it to their advantage.
- How to avoid fraud
In order to prevent such frauds, this is what you should not do:
- Never share details such as debit card number, expiry date, registration OTPs on the call or other media. The bank never asks for such details.
- Avoid clicking on unknown links or forwarding any suspicious SMS
- Never share your UPI MPIN with anyone.
- What you should keep in mind
Banks and other financial institutions have been warning customers never to share their OTPs and their bank account details with anyone over the phone or via SMS. Also, bank officials never ask such details from their customers.
Recently, banks have been putting out warnings on their websites, through their mails and via their social media accounts not to share their personal and financial information with anyone on phone or with anyone posing as official from the respective institution.
Stay Safe, Stay Guarded.