Pune cyber crime police see spurt in cases of UPI-based payment frauds

The cybercrime police of Pune have seen a spurt in the number of cases involving homegrown method of Unified Payment Interface (UPI)-based payments in the city. While there are multiple ways deployed to dupe gullible users, the problem arises especially with platforms that provide an option to generate payment requests. UPI-based payment options Google Pay and PhonePe are extremely popular in the country. The facility of generating payment requests on a few UPI platforms is being used by fraudsters to cheat victims, say officials of the Pune city cyber police. In four cases, one of the above-mentioned two UPI-based payment options, was used as a mode of committing fraud after convincing the victim to download the application for smoother transactions. In all four cases, the victims had registered a household item for sale on an e-commerce platform.