Bengaluru man narrowly escapes UPI scam. Here’s how he foiled it

When a scammer attempted to coax the senior vice president of Unacademy with a fake UPI money transfer scam, he foiled his plan and how. The incident happened when Hardik Pandya posted an ad on OLX to sell an iPad. Pandya took to X to share screenshots of his conversation with the scammer posing as buyer and highlighted the suspicious details that ‘raised all the alarms’ and helped him recognise the scam.
“UPI scam from this morning. Posted an ad for an iPad on OLX. Scammer gets in touch, takes it to WhatsApp and offers to transfer money instantly. Then does this,” wrote Pandya while sharing screenshots on X.
The screenshots shared by Pandya show how a man named Dilip Vikas first pretended to transfer ₹26,000 into Pandya’s account. He then requested he return ₹10,000 since he had paid more than the agreed amount. Upon checking his bank balance, Pandya realised that he hadn’t received any money, except for ₹1, which Vikas had sent to verify the account details.
That’s when the scammer shared a fake PhonePe screenshot where he ‘transferred’ ₹26,000 into Pandya’s account. What’s more, he even sent a message on his phone number saying that Pandya ‘received a payment of ₹26,000’.
Pandya then replied to his own tweet and wrote, “Obviously, it doesn’t take much to know this raised all the alarms from the get-go. But the imitation transaction messages sent manually by him were the funniest part!”
The tweet was shared on March 20. It has since then garnered more than 7.7 lakh views and the numbers are still increasing. Many even took to the comments section of the post to share their thoughts.
“They must be doing this to a lot of people. Successful scams embolden them to do more. Report them to authorities,” posted an individual.
Another added, “I sort of scammed the scammers today. They were offering me a part-time job for liking videos later they asked me to ‘invest’ money to get double returns. Earned easy ₹600.”
“Bro, the same scene happened to me many years ago, and the amount was 30K. I did complain about it but got nothing,” expressed a third.
A fourth commented, “I, too, was almost scammed in a similar way in OLX and also through UPI. Persons impersonating as army personnel.”
“Jamtara season 3 plot leaked,” shared a fifth.