PhonePe Files Complaint Against Paytm Employees For Burning Its QR Codes

Digital payment provider PhonePe has filed a police complaint against employees of rival fintech company Paytm for allegedly burning its QR codes.

PhonePe claimed that three Paytm employees had burned its QR codes. The complaint was registered with the Surajpur Lakhnawali police station in Uttar Pradesh's Greater Noida on July 29.

PhonePe approached the police on the basis of a video that showed a pile of its QR codes being burned. A spokesperson for PhonePe said they identified three people in the video as employees of Paytm.

One of the three persons is said to be a Paytm Area Sales Manager (ASM) while the other one was identified as a former employee of Paytm, a Moneycontrol report added.

The three persons accused of burning the QR codes include Aman Kumar Gupta, Devanshu Gupta, and Rahul Pal.

The complaint states that Devanshu Gupta worked for PhonePe from 2018 to 2022. It also highlighted that Gupta knew where he could source the QR codes from and conspired with others to steal and vanadalise them, as reported by Economic Times.

Responding to the incident, a spokesperson for Paytm said that those involved in this dispute are PhonePe's former workers.

The spokesperson added that they condemned the behaviour of the rogue employees, who have already been placed on administrative leave while a thorough investigation was being conducted.

PhonePe chief executive officer Sameer Nigam vented his anger on Twitter. “Worth mentioning that this ‘ex' employee of PhonePe works for Paytm now, and there are 10 other people in the video burning @PhonePe QR codes in broad daylight. Anyways, let the police investigate the matter and justice prevail…”, he tweeted.

The fiasco comes at a time when there's strong competition between the two companies for a larger share of the digital payments sector.