Why the sound matters more than the screen

A trader with six people in the queue does not read notifications. Their hands are full, their eyes are on the goods and the money, and the phone is somewhere on the table.

They hear a sound, or they do not.

The fraud this exists to stop

It is the simplest one in the market, and it works constantly.

The customer taps at their phone for a moment, turns the screen around, and shows a convincing picture of a completed payment. The trader is busy. The picture looks right. The goods go across the table.

The picture was a screenshot of somebody else’s payment, or an edited image, or a payment to a different number entirely.

A discreet notification is no defence at all against this, because the discreet notification was never seen.

Loud, long, and from your own phone

The alert is a genuine alarm and a vibration lasting several seconds. The screen shows the amount in large figures, a green tick and the payer’s name.

It is designed to be heard across a noisy market and understood without reading, because a significant number of the people relying on it do not read easily, and none of them are looking at the screen when it matters.

One rule, for everybody

If there was no sound, there was no money.

That is the whole of it, and it fits on a sign above a stall.

Not a screenshot. Not the customer’s screen. Not it has gone through, I promise. Not a message from a number you do not know. Your phone makes the sound, or no money has arrived.

Why your phone and not theirs

Anything the payer’s device shows you is a thing the payer controls — a screenshot, a recording, an edited image, a lookalike app.

The alert that counts is the one your own phone makes, because that one comes from the payment actually arriving.

Test it before you need it

There is a test alert in settings. Use it. Set your volume so you can hear it from the far end of your stall.

The point is familiarity: you should know that sound without looking up, the way you know the sound of your own name.

Everywhere at once

The same event reaches the phone app, the web app and the payout device, so a shopkeeper watching a till and a trader holding a phone are hearing the same thing about the same money.

What it costs

Nothing. It is the receipt.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• The alert is designed to be audible in a noisy market and to be understood without reading the screen.
• It fires on the money arriving, not on a payment being started, so it cannot be triggered by a customer’s action alone.
• It can be tested from settings, so a trader learns the sound before the first real payment.
• The same event reaches every surface, so a merchant watching a till screen and a trader holding a phone hear the same thing.

What it costs

Included on every account and every surface. There is no premium tier that makes the alert louder, because an alert a trader cannot hear is not worth selling.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Alerts you cannot miss on the features page.

Read next

• BitriQR payments — One code on the wall. Every payer it can reach.
• Point of sale — The till is the phone you already own.
• Agents and cash — The last mile is a person.