Two people, including a former Axis Bank employee, have been arrested on charges of financial fraud for stealing Rs 45 lakh from nine Axis Bank customers by taking advantage of the loopholes in the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments system, reports The Times of India. The report mentions that the perpetrators first extracted customers' 16-digit debit card number, expiry date, mobile number and address. Using this information they filed a fake lost SIM card complaint at a police station, following which they approached the telecom company with a copy of the police complaint and placed a request for a new SIM card. Since the perpetrators had all the requisite information, a new SIM card would be issued. This automatically invalidated the old SIM card, which would stop working. They would insert the new SIM in a phone, download the BHIM app, enter debit card number, and receive the OTP on the registered number to steal money. Apparently, 240 such transactions worth Rs 45 lakh were performed over 40 days. This troubling news comes at a time when, as per data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (which owns and operates payments systems such as UPI and IMPS): a) UPI saw a 31% growth in the total transaction volumes between April 2017 and May 2017, while the amount transacted increased by 23% on a monthly basis to Rs 2,765.3 crore, b) the BHIM app saw a transaction volume of 2.49 million for the month of…
