One of the most popular spam and caller ID apps in the market Truecaller found itself surrounded in controversy later on Tuesday after a lot of users of the application complained that the app was forcing them to sign up for the new Truecaller Pay app without permission. It’s notable that Truecaller Pay is a UPI payments based app newly introduced by Truecaller. Firstly, the users showed their disappointment on the Google Play Store in the reviews section as they typed their complaints. Later on, some complaints also surfaced on Twitter where the users of Truecaller was trying to sign them up for Truecaller Pay forcefully. The company, on the other hand, has said that this is because of a new bug.
Truecaller Blames Happening on a Bug
In its official statement, Truecaller said, “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.” It added, “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.”
A lot of Truecaller users took to Twitter to show their disappointment by tagging the Truecaller official account. Since registration for UPI based services requires the phone number of the user linked with a particular bank account to begin with, the application was trying to register the user for the payment service on its own. As a result, the users started receiving messages on their number like “Your registration for UPI app has started. If it was not you, report now to your bank.” After receiving these messages, the users of Truecaller were concerned and started responding to the company on various social media platforms. However, it is worth noting that the actual UPI registration would have gone through since it requires the users to enter their UPI ID manually.
Truecaller Launches New Fix for Bug
As per the official word from the company, Truecaller version 10.41.6 for Android released on July 24, had a bug which caused this issue with the users. Following this row, the company has stopped the rollout of this update and has started seeding a different version which brings a fix to this bug. Truecaller has said, “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.”
To recall, Truecaller launched its Payment service in March 2017, and as per the company, it currently boasts of having 1.5 crore users. The app has partnered up with ICICI Bank to handle the banking and transactional data of the users onboard the app.
