Digital payment frauds with the advent of online commerce have kept customers on vigil and companies proactive in building and designing their products and services that are least susceptible to online fraudsters who exploit loopholes in the system. Paytm has been among the leading new-age financial technology companies coming of age with the government’s push for cashless or digital transactions. But Paytm has also been targeted multiple times by black hat hackers, either customers, merchants or others, to crack into its system for data of millions of customers. For this, perhaps among many other things, Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma has deliberately designed Paytm’s OTP messages in a way that might frustrate users.
Instead of the OTP number being among the first few words in the message that could be easily visible to customers in the notification itself, Paytm puts it at the end of the message. Irked by the need to open the message to access the OTP, job search portal Instahyre’s founder Aditya Rajgarhia took to Twitter on Tuesday to highlight this. “I’m surprised no one there has faced this yet.”
However, confirming it to be a deliberate step to reduce OTP sharing with fraudsters, Sharma tweeted back saying, “We figured that whenever fraudsters call gullible customers, it is very easy for them to share OTP. Just so that they don’t share OTP, we put it at end of warning message.” By simply putting the number at the end of the text message, “we saw reduction in OTP sharing,” he said.
This OTP sharing at end of message is deliberate. We figured that whenever fraudsters call a gullible customers, it is very easy for them to share OTP.
Just so that they don’t share OTP, we put it at end of warning message.
Guess what, we saw reduction in OTP sharing ???? https://t.co/YrEZ6N4OVP— Vijay Shekhar Sharma (@vijayshekhar) May 26, 2020
The exchange of tweets began with Sharma tweeting about the challenge to locate ‘sign in’ option on a news portal. The option was available at the end of the dropdown menu instead of on the traditional top right corner of most of the websites.
