Truecaller signs up users for payment service without permission, blames bug
New Delhi : Truecaller signed up thousands of its users on the new payment service, known as Truecaller Pay, without seeking their permission, alleged several users on the social media.
On Monday morning, several people on Twitter blamed Truecaller of trying to sign up them on Truecaller Pay without seeking their consent. The company blamed a bug in the latest version of its app for unauthorised attempts for UPI registration in a statement.
“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,” Truecaller said. “This was a bug and we have discontinued this version of the app so no other users will be affected. 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.”
Tagging Truecaller and its various officials on the social media, people shared how they were getting text messages in their phone showing Truecaller had tried to register their bank accounts for its payments service. Here are some of the tweets:
@TruecallerHelp @Truecaller latest Android version 10.41.6 automatically sends SMS from my SIM to register my UPI Bank A/C to Truecaller pay without my consent the moment I updated to the latest version of the app.
— Raj Kapur (@rajkapur44) July 30, 2019
This is quite unacceptable & serious breach of privacy policy.
@Truecaller
— Neelkamal 🇮🇳 (@NeelkamalGilani) July 30, 2019
Dear Truecaller without my permission how can u register my bank for UPI.
This is totally unauthorized step you did.@CyberDost pls look into this.
was truecaller trying to scam its way into getting my UPI details this morning? the app automatically started and said there was a registration error and i got a notification from ICICI
— Go Carona Go (@RootKanal) July 30, 2019
According to the company, Truecaller version number 10.41.6 for Android, which was released on July 24, caused the automatic registrations.
"The bug only affected a small fraction of Truecaller's Android users in India," Truecaller added. "The rollout of the update was halted immediately after users reported the issue. Any users who have been registered for UPI services will automatically be deregistered at the back end. An updated version with the fix will be rolled out to all users soon."
