The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and iSpirt sought to allay fears of the recent fraudulent transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Both the NPCI and iSpirt said that the fraudulent transactions were due to glitches in Bank of Maharashtra's UPI application. Moneycontrol reported that Bank of Maharashtra filed a First Information Report (FIR) with the police in Pune against 50 people for illegally pulling money using the UPI app and causing a loss of Rs 6.14 crore to the bank. The report added that frauds sent multiple 'collect money' requests of up to Rs 1 lakh each over a period of 48 days to accounts held with Bank of Maharashtra through UPI. One of the key features of the UPI is that merchants and users can initiate a collect request for payments. "As far as we know, there was an internal issue with Bank of Maharashtra where they allowed a customer to send money to another account, even if the source account did not have balance," Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirt and governing council member told MediaNama in an email. The UPI is a part of the IndiaStack which was developed by the members of iSpirt. "This was an issue with the bank and its core banking system. Due to this bug, payments would have been possible from an account not having balance through multiple payment systems apart from UPI. In effect, this isn't a UPI issue. Bank of Maharashtra is rectifying the situation," Sharma added pinning the…
