Paytm Mall employees worked with third-party vendors in order to generate cashback offers and get benefits, according to the reports stemming from the auditing leader EY. The amount of the fraud ran up to about Rs. 10 crores. About 10 employees have been fired for colluding with more than 100 vendors through Paytm Mall and running a fraudulent scheme of cashbacks.

Earlier, Paytm had announced that it was partnering with E&Y in order to build a secure platform for all its users and to also create a fraud prevention system.

“After Diwali, what my team saw was that there were some small sellers who were getting a large percentage of the cashbacks and we as a team asked our auditors to do a deeper audit,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of Paytm, during a press conference in Mumbai.

While cashback continues to remain a sustainable model to onboard a large volume of customers, Sharma added that creating a strong technology-driven and secure network was the key to prevent fraudulent activities.

Such incidents usually hamper the trust levels between the existing employees and employers and lower the morale of the company. Over the last one year itself financial frauds have surfaced in banks, PSUs and e-commerce platforms. More than the CEOs, it is the HR leader’s responsibility to mitigate such frauds and have mechanisms in place to deal with the aftermath.

Interacting closely with all the employees, having a hand on the pulse of what the various teams are going through in terms of the work pressure and also ensuring that all transactions are well-documented are some of the simple ways.