Govt Working With Google Pay, Paytm To Block Real-Time Payments Fraud: Report

The Centre is reportedly working with third-party UPI apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, and others to implement enhanced safety measures that can detect and block suspicious peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-business (P2B) transactions in real time.

A Business Standard report, citing people familiar with the matter, said that the initiative is intended to curb fraudulent transactions carried out through TPAPs, particularly targeting scams that affect users with lower digital literacy.

It is aimed at ensuring that all transactions, regardless of the amount, undergo stricter checks and balances even if the transaction time increases by a few seconds, an official told BS.

To facilitate this, platforms such as Google Pay, Paytm, and others, may intentionally introduce slight delays, issue fraud alerts, and prompt users for additional confirmation before processing transactions that appear potentially fraudulent.

“We are leveraging all possible signals. While these are early days, the government is hopeful of arriving at a concrete solution to restrict payment fraud through UPI apps to a large extent,” an IT ministry official told BS. 

The official also said that Google Pay, Phonepe and Paytm have adopted a risk-based approach that allows them to restrict or block transactions for users classified as medium, high, or very high financial risk.

“With the help of artificial intel- ligence, we have gathered enough signals to flag potentially risky transactions,” a TPAP executive told BS. 

Digital Payments Scams On Rise 

With the increasing digital payment transactions due to availability of mobile phones and internet, fraudsters keep changing ways and create fake interfaces to dupe users into authorising transactions. 

India witnessed 6.32 Lakh cases of UPI payment frauds worth INR 485 Cr in the first six months of the financial year 2024-25 (FY25), as per government data. 

To curb this, the government and private players need to team up to find effective solutions and make the users aware at the same time. 

It was reported last year that the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) innovation arm is discussing with 10 public and private sector banks to accelerate the adoption of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to detect cases of financial fraud via “mule accounts”. 

Mule accounts are bank accounts used for illegal activities such as money laundering, fraud, and other illegal operations. 

While the initiatives like the recent one to detect and block transactions in real time take a little time to roll out, they are expected to potentially reduce digital payments frauds.