I woke up early morning to see a missed call and a voicemail at midnight yesterday from the Indian credit card customer service agent mentioning my card is blocked due to suspicious activity. All I did was use it to buy an electrical appliance on Amazon. After being interrogated by two personnel over the phone, they reactivated my card. I tried to make another purchase on Amazon, and this time the payment was declined and the card was blocked again. I wrote a scathing email to the credit card company to just close my account after I pay the outstanding bill amount. That Indian credit card is unusable.
I then bought a metro card for seamless travel on Hyderabad metro. Earlier, I was using TSvaari app to buy point-to-point tickets everytime I travel. This PhonePe RuPay prepaid card will be a life saver. At least that's what I thought. When trying to topup the balance on the card using the UPI QR code behind, I started facing issues. The receiving bank would not want to receive my payment through Google Pay. I went to the ticket terminal in Jubilee Hills and requested that they topup my card, only to be told to try again to use UPI QR code behind. Apparently it takes a lot of time for them to do topup using their payment terminal. Sigh! Several people cut me off and started buying metro tickets. I gave up.
After having a coffee with a friend at a cafe in Jubilee hills, I went back to the metro station again, but this time I was determined to get the guy at the payment terminal to process my topup request. I insisted that none of the workarounds he asked me to do (like trying to recharge with 500 Rupees instead of 1000 etc.). He then took about three minutes to topup my metro card. Victory!
Meanwhile, Amazon cancelled my order and god knows why. I tried to inquire the customer care, but the Amazon India app is designed for you to never be able to reach a human. The AI agent was trying to show empathy, but it was so annoying to see that live chat and call back features are completely useless. I am just left with the customer care number now, which I plan to reach out tomorrow. I am curious why Amazon automatically cancelled my order even though I paid it in full using Netbanking.
Also, I do not want to get started on the number of OTPs I am receiving each day to do basic transactions online. Digital India has many features, but most of them are inaccessible or unusable.