Every day, for the last seven years, Arun Kumar has set up his fruit stall on a busy Mumbai street.
It’s not an easy way to make a living.
“Being a street vendor is a challenge. There’s the fear of being robbed or, as I am not a licensed vendor, the local body can come and dismantle my store anytime,” he says.
But over the past four years at least one aspect of his work has become easier.
“Prior to Covid everything was in cash. But now everyone pays with UPI. Scan the code and the payment is done within seconds.
“No issues of handling cash, giving change to customers. It has made my life and business smooth,” he says.
UPI, or to give it its full name the Unified Payments Interface, was launched in 2016 in a collaboration between India’s central bank and the nation’s banking industry.
It’s an app-based instant payment system, which allows users to send and receive money, pay bills and authorise payments in a single step – no need to enter bank details or any other personal information. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s free.
It has become so popular that India is now the biggest real-time payments market.
In May, UPI recorded 14 billion transactions, up from nine billion the year before.
But the popularity and ease of use has made it a rich feeding ground for scammers.
“While digital payments are convenient, they do come with vulnerabilities,” says Shashank Shekhar, founder of the Delhi-based Future Crime Research Foundation.
Mr Shekhar says that scammers use a variety of ways to trick people, including persuading them to share their UPI pin number, which is needed to authorise payments.
Some scammers have also created fake UPI apps, that are clones of legitimate banking apps, and then steal login details or other valuable information.
“The pace at which digital transformation took place in the country means unfortunately digital literacy and safe internet practice could not catch up,” says Mr Shekhar.
He says that between January 2020 and June 2023 almost half of all financial fraud involved the use of the UPI system.
According to government figures there were more than 95,000 cases of fraud involving UPI in the financial year ending April 2023, up from 77,000 in the previous year.
