TrustCheckr, a fraud data insights and analytics startup, revealed that the most number of UPI scams take place on payment apps and market places with 41% of fraud distribution accounted in eastern parts of India – West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim. The top frauds take place in KYC, fake cash-back, frauds through digital wallets, fake-selling, QR codes, UPI phishing, lottery scams and financial fraud on social media.
Insights into the survey reveal that the top scamsters were from Patna, Chandigarh, Kolkata and Meerut for one of the top payment apps at 15%. Most QR Code scams originate from Assam, accounting for 20% of the total distribution.
Interestingly, it was observed that many fraudster profiles claimed to be army men; this is most likely the result of border clashes between India and China due to which there was an upsurge in patriotic sentiments among the general public and the fraudsters looked to cash in on the sentiment by playing the emotional card. In QR code frauds, most fraudsters posed themselves as army men selling something on marketplaces.
With the pandemic having pushed people to lean further towards contactless payments, lack of awareness and vulnerabilities in confidential card details are increasing digital frauds. TrustCheckr identified over 1 million frauds together in B2B and B2C in the last 15 months – 25% scams in KYC and 20% in QR codes, while B2B scams were largely done with 30% fake identities and 25% synthetic identity frauds. TrustCheckr’s findings are based on 350,000 data points collected from top hashtags, 200+ Twitter handles, partner data shared over the last 12 months and proprietary Social scanning technology of TrustCheckr.
“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,” said Adhip Ramesh, Founder, TrustCheckr.
Shivraj Harsha, Co-founder, TrustCheckr, warns against callers who agree to pay any price for products. “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.”
TrustCheckr, a Bengaluru-based fraud data insights startup, has developed solutions to validate customers, cut fraud loss and make digital transactions safer. Particularly useful for fintech, payment, online websites, P2P transactions, dating and classified apps, these solutions leverage partnership with government websites and organisations for data sharing, website scanning and 3rd party API to run a social scanning for consumers and businesses and generate a TrustScore.