Made UPI Payment To Wrong Person? There Is A Small Chance You Will Get The Money Back

Mobile payments via UPI have become extremely popular among Indian users over the last few years, so much that some have even stopped carrying wallets or hard cash to pay for grocery, phone bills or even a regular chai stall. However, the technology has some qualms and most of that involves human error and sadly a wrong UPI payment might be hard to reverse.

What this means is that, if you send money to an incorrect number, chances are you might never get the money back. The only small chance you have to reverse the transaction involves a positive impact from the receiver or even the bank from which the payment was made.

The worrying update about payment reversal and the challenges with it have been shared by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) in a recent post on X. “We request everyone to be cautious while making a transaction. Any wrong transactions are irreversible from our end. Kindly cross-check all details of the beneficiary before proceeding for a transaction. Please contact your bank for further assistance.”

The post on X makes it clear that making a payment via UPI (usually through phone numbers) needs the sender to be 100 percent sure of the number they are sending the money to, because even going wrong with one digit in the number can result in sending your money to the wrong person.

Once that happens, you need to contact the receiver and convince them to reverse the payment. The person has a good reason to deny sending the money back and that’s because they might feel it could be a ruse to scam them of more money, which is quite possible these days.

Having said that, if the person doesn’t agree, you can reach out to the bank and see if they can help get your money back. Instances like these have been reported quite often which explains the need to have a different fix for the problem.

Recently it has been reported that UPI payments could have a 4-hour delay which can make it easy to reverse the wrong payments done but the feature will only roll out once it is passed by the relevant authorities.