Google Pay users, these are the 5 critical safety tools that you should not miss – Times of India

Consumer confidence to embrace UPI as a form of payment has seen consistent growth in the last few years. The pandemic, and the lockdown that followed, resulted in businesses and individuals embracing digital payments quicker than ever before. This led to the emergence of the buzzword – ‘Contactless payments’ as people started using it for essential services including mobile recharges, utility bill payments, and buying things online. And, the data shared by NPCI on a monthly basis clearly reflects the acceleration in digital payments in the country.
While the country has seen an uptick in the digital payments space, there are also growing concerns around the increase in instances of online payment scams. Being one of the key players in the UPI domain, Google says that it has always placed safety and security at the heart of the Google Pay experience. Google Pay comes with various features to help users safeguard themselves against fraud. Here are the in-built safety tools in the Google’s UPI app.
Secure access through UPI PIN: The PIN entry screens in Google Pay have been secured against remote desktop attacks since the early days of the app’s launch, keeping our users safe, even when widespread scams have affected other digital payments users.
Blocking fraudsters from getting on to Google Pay: There is risk relations check at the onboarding stage; it prevents known bad actors from recreating their accounts on the app.
Scam protections: Google Pay uses machine learning-based scam prevention models, and also displays explicit warnings if a user receives a request from someone suspicious or not in their contacts.
Explicit language and prominent warnings during collect requests: Collect requests as flow are unique to UPI and thus might be new to several users. For this reason, Google Pay displays very clear and prominent warnings to the user about what it entails at each step.
Notifications and SMS alerts that clearly tell the direction of the flow of money: Google Pay sends app notifications as well as SMS to inform users each time they receive a collect request to highlight that approving the request will deduct money from the users’ bank accounts.