Truecaller stops onboarding new users until bug affecting UPI payments is fixed
On Monday evening, a bug on Truecaller app started automatically creating UPI accounts with ICICI Bank for users, without their consent.
Indian retail payments organisation, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), said that Truecaller has stopped onboarding new users, until the bug, which was automatically enrolling users to use UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payment feature on the app is fixed.
Speaking about the issue, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of NPCI assured that customers' accounts, which were accidentally enrolled by Truecaller won’t be affected, in any way. In a statement, he said,
"This is enrolling mistake by the app without customer consent. With this, the customer can’t do any UPI transaction. For onboarding to UPI the customer has to still enter 2 Factor Authentication (issuer OTP and debit card), and set UPI pin. The workflow mistake is limited to enrolling, which will not have any impact on any customer account whatsoever."
The NPCI authorises platforms to use UPI system for money transfer.
On Monday evening, a bug on Truecaller app, which claims to have close to 100 million users in India, started automatically creating UPI accounts with ICICI Bank, without the user's consent.
According to media wire IANS, the scare caused some users to immediately reach out to ICICI Bank and block their debit and netbanking accounts.
In response to this, Truecaller, admitted its mistake on Tuesday, and blamed the latest app update for the mishap. Releasing a statement to the media, it added,
“We have discovered a bug in the latest update of Truecaller that affected the payments feature, which automatically triggered a registration post updating to the version. This was a bug and we have discontinued this version of the app so no other users will be affected.”
The Swedish company further added that it is taking steps to roll out a new version with the fix,
“We're sorry about this version not passing our quality standards. We've taken quick steps to fix the issue, and already rolled out a fix in a new version. For the users already affected, the new version with the fix will be available shortly, however, in the meanwhile they can choose to manually deregister through the overflow menu in the app."
According to data released by NPCI, the total UPI transactions in the country stood at 754.54 million (75.54 crores) in the month of June.
This is a minor increase (close to three percent) from the month of May when the total UPI transactions in the country stood at 733.54 million (73.35 crore).
(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)
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