Paytm, a digital wallet used by more than 230 million people in India to make cashless payments, shared with the Indian government the personal data of users in a geopolitically sensitive region, according to a report published by Cobrapost, an Indian investigative news agency.



On Friday, the news agency released a video where a reporter went undercover and recorded Paytm’s vice president, Ajay Shekhar Sharma, saying how the company had handed over personal data of users in the state of Jammu and Kashmir after Sharma personally received a call from the prime minister’s office following incidents of stone-pelting by Kashmiri Muslims against India’s armed forces, something that happens frequently in the region.

“They told us to give them data, saying maybe some of the stone-pelters are Paytm users,” Sharma says in the video. He also talks about his close ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization known for being the ideological front of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Paytm, an $8 billion company which counts Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and China’s Alibaba Group among its largest investors, was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Ajay Shekhar Sharma’s older brother. Paytm’s growth, especially in the wake of “demonetization,” when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned most high-value currency notes overnight, made Vijay Shekhar Sharma India’s youngest billionaire at 44.

On Friday evening, the company responded to the controversy by tweeting that it had never shared user data except with law enforcement agencies “on request.”