Major push towards cashless Jamaica
Prime Minister Andrew Holness will move Jamaica closer to becoming a cashless state with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with India to implement the unified payment interface (UPI), which is a digital payment platform being used by countries desirous of dethroning cash as king.
While several countries are moving to implement UPI, which is an app-based instant payment system, its popularity and ease of use have also made it very attractive to scammers. UPI was launched in 2016 in collaboration with India’s central bank and the nation’s banking industry. By May 2024, it had recorded 14 billion transactions.
UPI’s popularity has made India the biggest real-time payments market currently, but according to founder of the Delhi-based Future Crime Research Foundation, Shashank Shekhar, the increased usage has revealed a major vulnerability. He told the BBC that scammers are using a variety of ways to trick people, including persuading them to share their UPI PIN (personal identification number), which is needed to authorise payments. Scammers are also creating fake UPI apps that are clones of legitimate banking apps to steal login details or other valuable information.
“The pace at which digital transformation took place in the country means unfortunately, digital literacy and safe internet practice could not catch up,” Shekhar told the BBC.
According to the BBC report, between January 2020 and June 2023, almost half of all financial fraud involved the use of the UPI system. Government data shows that there were more than 95,000 cases of fraud involving UPI in the financial year ending April 2023, up from 77,000 in the previous year.
“UPI IDs are generally expressed as phone numbers followed by the UPI provider extension. This is exploited by scamsters. Phone numbers and details are soft targets since phone numbers are shared often and are quoted at multiple places—e-shopping, restaurants, malls, parking places, and so on. Given that it’s easy to crack UPI IDs, customers using the same phone numbers for online and digital transactions need to be well aware of the risks. There have been a number of fraud cases in the past where customers have approved transactions thinking it’s a receipt but have ended up transferring money from their account,” Vikram Babbar, chairperson of the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists (ACFCS) India chapter, told the Economic Times in August.
Holness said e-Gov Jamaica will be moving forward with the implementation of the UTI platform locally and noted that the digital payments will be led by the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ). He said the government remains committed to investing in public digital infrastructure projects that will improve service delivery for Jamaicans and visitors alike.
“Our cooperation with India is to catalyse it and to make it much more widely available,” he said of the digital payment platform.
