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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> UPI in India does not have ability to reverse transactions either. So does not countless p2p payment systems. UPI alone processes billions of transactions weekly.

There's a dispute mechanism which will eventually be escalated to a bank which does have the power to revert transcations https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/dispute-redressal-mec...

Same with "countless p2p systems" because the majority of them are just an intermediary between banks. For example, here's Swish from Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/faq/private/i-accidentally-swished-the-...

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There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money which in case of scam is low. You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person and ask them to send the money back.

You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

> There's very limited area where banks can refund the transaction where they are at fault. It is not reversal.

If we're talking in general, no, banks can revert transactions when you pay for something and that turns out to be a scam, or goods/services are not delivered.

I don't know how it works in the case of P2P transactions, but I expect many of the protections to still apply.

> For reversing, they have to contact the receiving bank and person to send back the money

> You can do that with crypto too. Contact the person

There's a big difference between a bank contacting another bank to revert an incorrect or frauduent transaction, and trying to contact a stranger to send your money back.

> You also need police report and the sum has to be big enough for them to bother.

Compare this to crypto where if your money's gone, your money's gone, regardless of the sum or the intent.

The topic was UPI. Not general.

You can ask bank to reverse card transaction and certain form of transfers but for UPI, there is no automatic reversal. Your bank needs to contact other bank after receiving police report to freeze the account and then sort it out. The scammer will take out the money before that or move it.

It is not reversal and it is not an option in practice unless the amount is very big which is rare for P2P. There is an upper limit on transactions enforced on UPI.

The point still stands that reversal is not a significant problem for adoption when it's such as an edge case. UPI added dispute handling standard process only after it was processing more than billions of transactions monthly.

There is something else holding crypto back from being used for payments.

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