How Safe Is It?

With the growing digitalization, it’s just to make sure that the transaction you’re doing is safe. While performing any UPI transaction, there are chances that phishers may try to breach and do any fraudulent activities. To answer this here’s a quick guide to prevent any unavoided actions.

• You must always avoid sharing your credentials (such as PIN, Password, or any sensitive information)
• Never save your card details (debit/credit) while performing any transaction
• There are a bunch of fraud apps available in the market today, avoid downloading them on your phone as they might get access to your wallet or other related apps.
• If you’re about to receive any funds, perform safe methods for doing so (such as QR, Phone numbers only) and ensure that you’re not sharing any OTP
• Certain cases have been reported of fraudulent activities (such as cloning, unsecured links, etc.) so it’s best to avoid visiting such websites.

As per the Government’s Cybersecurity department, more than 60,000 fraud activities were involved alone in the month of May 2022. Among those 30,000+ complaints were directly involved with UPI transactions dented more than 150 crores. 

UPI – Unified Payment Interface was first introduced in 2016 with just 21 banks and had almost 0 transactions for straight 3 months and is now leading the chart globally. The mastermind behind this approach was Dr. Raghuram G Rajan (RBI Governer).

From April 2016 to August 2022, the graph has significantly changed, now there are above 345 Banks live on UPI and a total number of transactions has crossed 10,72,792 crores (as of August 2022) and this figure itself is proof that how people have become adaptive on making more and more cashless UPI payments.

The unique part about UPI is that it holds the power of discarding ATM machines and also allows customers to link multiple bank accounts in a single mobile application. It offers 2 modes of payment i.e. P2P (Peer to Peer) and P2M (Peer to Merchant). 

Sooner banks started promoting the use of cashless transactions and it spread like a fire (YOY). Most of you must be wondering how actually this whole ecosystem works in just a few clicks. Well, we’re here to answer that. Let’s see the insights of UPI and its working metrics.