Check who a UPI QR really pays, before you send money

When this is worth doing

Three situations account for almost everyone who needs this.

A QR arrived from someone else

A supplier, a buyer, a landlord, or a stranger in a marketplace chat sends you a QR image and asks you to pay it. The image is already sitting on your phone, so checking it costs you nothing. You learn the UPI ID it pays and whether it demands a fixed amount, before any money moves.

You are about to publish your own QR

You have a QR that is going on a sticker, a poster, a menu, or an invoice template. Check it once here and you find out now, rather than after a hundred copies are printed, whether it carries the UPI ID you meant and an amount you did not intend to lock in.

Something already went wrong

You scanned a QR and the money went to a name you did not recognise, or you suspect the QR at a counter had been covered with someone else's sticker. Reading the code tells you which UPI ID actually received the request. That is the detail your bank and the police will ask for.

What this page reads

• UPI payment links. The standard upi://pay format that most shared QRs use.
• Merchant QR codes. The printed Bharat QR and EMV format found at shop counters, including its built in checksum. A checksum that does not match its own contents means the code was damaged, misread, or altered.
• Everything else. Website links, app only deep links, and plain text. If a QR presented to you as a payment turns out to be a website link, that is worth knowing before you tap it.

What it cannot do

This is the important part, and no tool should pretend otherwise.

• It cannot tell you a QR is safe. It reports contents. Judgement stays with you.
• It cannot confirm that a UPI ID belongs to the business named on it. There is no public directory to check that against, and anyone claiming to offer one is guessing.
• It cannot tell you whether a person intends to deliver what they promised. Most UPI losses are ordinary broken promises rather than technical trickery.
• It cannot recover money that has already been sent.

What it does do is remove the guesswork about what the code contains, so the only question left is one you can actually answer.

The check that matters most

Your payment app shows the registered name of the account holder immediately before you confirm. That name comes from the bank, not from the QR, and it cannot be faked by editing an image. Read it every time. If it does not match who you think you are paying, stop there.

A QR image can say anything. The name your app displays at the moment of payment is the one piece of the transaction that a fraudster does not control.

If you have already lost money

Tell your bank immediately and ask them to raise a dispute. In India you can report cyber financial fraud on the 1930 helpline or at cybercrime.gov.in. Speed matters more than anything else, because funds can sometimes be frozen before they are withdrawn. This website is independent, is not connected to any bank, the NPCI, or the police, and cannot recover money or contact anyone on your behalf.

For the background on how these scams are set up, read how UPI QR code scams work and the UPI safety guide.

Your image stays on your device

The decoding happens in your browser using your own processor. The image is never uploaded, never stored, and never sent anywhere. You can confirm this by loading the page, disconnecting from the internet, and checking a QR anyway. It still works.