Exclusive: Airtel Retailers Are Unethically Opening Airtel Payment Banks Account In The Garb Of Mobile’s Aadhaar e-KYC!

This is a question of ethics, more than legality. This is about brutally destroying your customer’s trust, in order to romp up random numbers.

This is wrong, and this has to stop.

An Airtel user from Sirsa, Haryana has alleged that Airtel retailers are forcefully, without any consent, opening Airtel payment bank account in the garb of linking Aadhaar card with Airtel number.

We have just spoken with that person who put forward these allegations via Tweets, addressed to Airtel.

And here are the details.

The Airtel Way To Increase Payment Banks Customers?

Bhupesh Garg from Sirsa, Haryana was receiving a lot of notifications from Airtel, asking him to connect his Aadhaar with Airtel number.

Just like any law-abiding citizen, he went to the nearest Airtel retailer and provided his Aadhaar for eKYC. Along with his own number, he also provided his wife’s number and her Aadhaar details for completing the eKYC process.

Airtel’s Aadhar based verification of existing mobile number opens an Airtel payment bank by default. This is concern. pic.twitter.com/jRPm2BvZNg — Bhupesh Garg (@bhupeshgarg) May 27, 2017

The trouble began when her wife’s Aadhaar was linked with her Airtel number. As soon as she provided her fingerprints for Aadhaar verification, she received an SMS stating that her Airtel payments bank account has been opened.

Bhupesh saw this message and confronted the Airtel retailer. As per Bhupesh, he specifically told the Airtel retailer that he doesn’t want any account with Airtel Payments Bank. All he needs to do is link his Aadhaar with Airtel mobile number.

When Bhupesh provided his own fingerprint for Aadhaar eKYC, the same thing happened: He received a new SMS from Airtel stating that his separate Airtel Payments Bank account has been opened.

Who Is Guilty Here: Airtel Or Airtel Retailer?

As per Bhupesh, the retailer took his and his wife’s phone in the pretext of linking their respective Airtel numbers with Aadhaar card.

However, within the Airtel app, there is an option to select if the user wants to open a new Airtel Payments bank account. It seems that either that option is selected to be yes by default, or that retailer deliberately selected that option, which opened a new Airtel Payment Bank, then and there.

When we spoke with Bhupesh, he was anguished over the fact that despite telling that Airtel retailer not to open Airtel Payments Bank account, he still opened it.

Bhupesh has already Tweeted this incident and tagged Airtel for help, but at the time of writing, there has been no response. He said that he will contact Airtel customer care very soon.

Airtel had opened 100,000+ Payments Bank accounts within 2 weeks of its launch.

Is this the way Airtel is ramping up numbers for their Payments Bank?

Will Airtel take any action and stop this practice? Are Airtel retailers being paid any incentives to open Payments Bank account?

We will keep you updated as we receive more details. Stay tuned!