“I really have no clue where my money went. Who ate my money? Is it Paytm or is it Nextra. They are both throwing me on each other, without a serious professional courtesy & willingness to resolve this matter. This is really scary. Thank God I did not trusted them with a larger amount. Any ideas? anyone”?
Paytm needs no introduction unless you are living under a rock for a long period of time. Paytm is a one of the leading digital wallet and payments platform in India. It makes easy to transfer money using mobile phone or pc and can integrate several instruments of payments including Net Banking, UPI, Debit Cards, Credit cards and even Cash deposits.
I have been using paytm since its inception for making utility payments, cab payments, sending and receiving payments. I was very easy to use it. No more writing cheques was quite a relief. It has been quite a comforting experience until few days back.
I use Nextra broadband service for my internet connectivity. I surprisingly is among very few ISPs that provide symmetrical broadband connections at consumer level. A symmetrical connection facilitates same upload and download speeds unlike traditional DSL connections that cap your upload speed to 1/8th of your download speed. For example if you have un-symmetrical broadband connection with 10mbps download speed, your upload speed will be 1.25mbps (1/8 of 10mbps). In symmetrical connection I get upload and download both at 40mbps.
Now comes the part where the problem started. I had to pay my monthly internet bill that sums up to Rs 707/-. I simply went to my Nextrawolrd account and initiated the payment process. I chose UPI as payment method, like I normally do to make payments via my Paytm UPI account. After selecting the UPI method, my Paytm Mobile app got a notification of this UPI payment demand. I went ahead and made the payments from my bank account linked with Paytm. So far so good. I received SMS from bank confirming the deducted amount. Paytm recorded this transaction.
My bank account statement screenshot is attached showing this transaction. Transaction ID and details are present along with and amount of Rs. 707, underlined in red.
This was on August 8, 2019. I sat back thinking “OK this is done!”. 2 Hours later I called my ISP (nextra) with request to activate my internet connection. The customer support guy replied “Sir aapka payment due hai”. When I explained that I’ve already made the payments, he asked me to wait for a couple of hours to reflect in their system. I waited but the same story next day. A week passed and they still didn’t received it. I called paytm customer support and they said “The transaction was successful and has been sent to the merchant. You should call the merchant for refunds”. I raised a support ticket but still same response. Here are the screenshots:
This issue was really testing my patience. I finally gave another call to the merchant, Nextra the ISP I sent payment to and asked for official mail with confirmation that they did not received this payment. The customer support guy immediately send the mail with their paytm dashboard confirming that the transfer never reached them. Below is the screenshot of that mail from Nextra (The Merchant):
I sent this screen shot to paytm and requested a refund. But the support chat response was still at square one. “The transaction was successful. You should contact the merchant”!!! This is so irritating.
- My bank account statement shows that the AMOUNT WAS DEDUCTED.
- Paytm History Says TRANSACTION WAS SUCCESSFUL
- Nextra Broadband (The Merchant) has proof that THEY DID NOT RECEIVED IT.
