In a bid to crackdown on hundreds of cyberfraud activities, the Indian government has issued new security measure for lakhs of UPI user in India. The safety measure, called the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI), has been put in place to involve banking and non banking institutions in preventing common UPI-related scams and frauds happening to the citiziens.
Released by the Department of Telecom(DoT), the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator will essentially analyse certain phone numbers and eventually block such numbers from trying to attempt any kind of cybercriminal activity. Launched under Digital Intelligence Platform, the idea is to create a secure payments ecosystem and encourage more people to openly adopt digital transactions across the country.
The FRI system will help banks and non banking institutions in identifying the risky transactions before they are completed, thus preventing innocent users from falling prey to scammers.
UPI security update for millions of users
The Financial Fraud Risk indicator system will be a tool for financial institutions to keep an eye on notorious phone numbers and UPI addresses. It is said that the FRI will flag numbers that have been reported as spam or cybercriminal sources. It will also include numbers that failed the verification process and found to have breached severak regulations.
Once the numbers are flagged, they will categories into three levels of risk – medium, high and very high. The categorisation will be solely done based on the data from the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal, Chakshu platform and other intelligence inputs from financial institutions.
After the categorization, the data is fed into the central servers. Whenever a UPI user attempts to transfer money to a number which is marked as ‘Very High Risk’, the UPI app will block the transaction while alerting the user. For those numbers marked as Medium risk, a warning will be provided to the user.