Digital frauds or UPI scams are strong in the country's eastern states, check report

According to a survey, extreme levels of digital spam or UPI fraud (41%) are occurring in the country's eastern states through payment apps and online storefronts. West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, according to TrustCheckr, are experiencing the highest levels of fraud in KYC, fraudulent cash-back, digital wallet theft, counterfeit, QR codes, UPI phishing, lottery threats, and money laundering on social networking sites. For one of the largest payment apps (at 15%), the top scammers are from Patna, Chandigarh, Kolkata, and Meerut, and the majority of QR Code scams come from Assam, accounting for 20% of the overall spread. The report also stated that "Top cities where fraudster syndicates are active are Kolkata, Delhi, Jaipur, Guwahati, Patna, Chandigarh, Meerut." Most QR code scammers appeared to be armed forces advertising something on online marketplaces.

Shivraj Harsha, Co-founder of TrustCheckr said that "Digital scams can trick users as they may appear as legitimate by revealing a few authentic details about them in order to earn their trust and move money. If it sounds too good to be true, one should be careful about such transactions. Our score parameters can give a go-ahead or early warning signs of fraud." In the last 15 months, TrustCheckr has found over 1 million scams in both B2B and B2C, with 25% of scams including KYC and 20% including QR codes, and B2B scams that included 30% false identities and 25% fake identity scams. Adhip Ramesh, Founder of TrustCheckr stated that "The common thread of digital payment frauds is phone number and email address. We check fraud signals with phone/email, validate the customer authenticity using historical fraud trends, fraud data sets, history and provide simple REST APIs with phone numbers as input, integration in less than 48 hours."

In April, the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, reported 2.64 billion or 264 crore transactions worth Rs 4,93,663 crore, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in a tweet. UPI had 2.73 billion or 273 crore transactions in March, totaling Rs 5,04,886 crore. Though overall transactions fell slightly in April, the regular transaction rate for UPI remained relatively similar in the last two months, at approximately 88 million.