CBI has filed a first information report (FIR) against seven customers listed by the company and unknown officials of Paytm.
The company has not identified any of its officials. However, it has mentioned that its employees facilitating refunds have specific login id and passwords.
“During routine reconciliation of accounts, the company found that in 37 cases where refunds were made to the wallet or bank account of customers, delivery of orders were successfully made to the same customers,” said M Sivakumar, legal manager of the company.
CBI has registered a case under provisions of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery besides invoking provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act. The customers who allegedly cheated Paytm were based in Lodhi Colony in New Delhi, besides Mathura and Bhilwara.
Surprisingly, customers having names like “hotty killer” and “brother” did not ring any alarm bells in the systems of the of the firm as the refunds were facilitated despite successful delivery.
“As a matter of fact, in cases, where delivery of orders was successful and satisfactory to customers, refund should not have happened. However, in all the cases, refunds happened to the customers,” the complaint alleged. The details given by the company shows that Mathura-based "hotty killer" had made six purchases in seven days between March 3-April 6, including an Apple iphone 6S worth Rs 45,688 and a Samsung Galaxy J2 for Rs 8,705. In all these cases, refunds were processed by an employee having an id sunil.bisht@paytm.com.
The employee had also processed seven more orders of a customer identified as Pankaj Chaudhary, also a resident of the same address as “hotty killer”, between February 19-April 3. But despite having ids of its executive, the firm did not name him in the complaint and subsequently the FIR is also against unknown employees.
“The fraudulent refunds as brought out under this complaint happened through the use/illegal use of user ids and password of employees of the company entrusted for this task. Hence, either the employees themselves or someone associated with them or some unknown people have fraudulently refunded the order amount with common intentions to gain wrongfully,” the complaint, which is now a part of the CBI FIR, alleged.