At an industry summit, payment leaders said OTPs and PINs no longer stop scams where victims send the money themselves. New checks aim to catch trouble first.
India's payment industry is trying to stop scams before the money leaves your account. At a Business Standard summit, leaders from Google Pay, Razorpay, Mindgate Solutions and a Reserve Bank of India-backed platform said a payment can be fully secure and still be a scam, because the customer was tricked into sending it.
Arif Khan of Razorpay said one-time passwords, PINs and other login checks are no longer enough. The bigger problem, he said, is the context and intent behind a payment. Fraudsters use fear, urgency and impersonation, such as posing as law enforcement officials, so victims pay willingly. The question is no longer only whether a payment is authorized, but whether the person understands what they are doing.
Karan Sapra of Google Pay said fraud has shifted from hacking technical systems to manipulating people. The company is focusing on user education, warnings shown in the moment and artificial intelligence that spots suspicious patterns. Warnings can appear in English, Hindi/English or regional languages. It has also added haptic alerts, which are gentle phone vibrations meant to break routine payment habits and make people reconsider a risky payment.
Lalit Chowdhary of Mindgate Solutions said larger banks have strengthened their fraud checks, but weak spots often remain at the edges of the system. Stolen money can pass quickly through mule accounts, which are accounts used to move it along, making recovery hard.
K Satyanarayana Raju of India Digital Payment Intelligence Corporation described the Digital Payment Intelligence Platform, built by the RBI Innovation Hub. Its first phase is a registry of suspicious account identifiers that participating institutions can check against. Raju gave these figures from the time of the discussion:
The goal is to flag mule accounts when they are opened or added as a payee, and through periodic checks, ideally before anyone files a complaint. The platform aims to onboard 120 regulated banking entities and 69 payment aggregators.
A planned second phase would score individual payments for risk using transaction histories and behavior patterns. Both the sending and receiving banks would see the score. They could then decide whether a payment goes ahead or whether the credit to the receiver is held for more checks. Khan said the challenge is to combine device, transaction, merchant and receiving-account signals in under a second. Raju said the system could later extend to cooperative banks, NBFCs, insurers and e-commerce, but stabilizing the early phases comes first. No timeline was given in the material.
Until these tools reach everyone, the basics matter. Pause if someone is rushing you or claims to be an official. If your payment app shows a warning, take it seriously before you approve.
Even a payment you approve yourself can be a scam, so slow down when someone rushes you or poses as an official, and heed your app's warnings.
Fake PayPal emails and texts, some posing as a security report, try to get you to tap a link and type your login. Checking your account directly avoids the trap.
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