Razorpay on AltNews donor data: Handed over data after receiving official notice

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Payments gateway Razorpay has reacted to AltNews' statement that said the payments platform shared its donor data with the police, stating that it responded to an official notice.

A Razorpay spokesperson told Moneycontrol, "We received an official written notice from police authorities under Section 91 of the Code Of Criminal Procedure, 1973 which we complied with by sharing the data. We are mandated to comply with the same as per the regulation under the provisions of the law."

"We tried reaching out to the company [AltNews] but did not receive any response and hence could not inform them before sharing the data or deactivating the account for a brief period on July 4," the spokesperson added.

Under Section 91 of the CrPC, any court or any officer in charge of a police station can seek data that is deemed important for any ongoing investigation.

On July 4, fact-checking platform AltNews tweeted a statement saying Razorpay has disabled its account, informing users as donations that people were attempting to make weren’t going through. Sometime later, the account was enabled and many took to Twitter to share that donations are going through.

Following AltNews' statement, Razorpay issued a clarification on July 4 saying, "The merchant account was deactivated from the Razorpay platform temporarily, as a safety precaution, during the preliminary investigation by the authorities. Following clarity on the issue, we have unblocked and reactivated the account. We have extended our full cooperation to the authorities in the investigation and will continue to do so, as needed."

"Razorpay is a trusted company and we will always ensure transactions on the platform are safe and compliant with all laws and regulations."

AltNews then took to Twitter to inform its donors that their data had been shared by Razorpay saying the information was shared with the police without informing AltNews, or without even a preliminary investigation or any violation on the part of the platform.

“We had put out a statement yesterday stating that Razorpay, our donation platform, had disabled our account. Shortly after that, Razorpay re-enabled our account and issued a statement that they had temporarily deactivated our account upon receiving a request from police authorities, and have re-activated it after getting some clarity,” the post read.

“It has not been specified by them as to what this 'clarity' is. However, if Razorpay had indeed found that we had violated their terms of services, they wouldn't have re-enabled our account.”

AltNews added that it will continue with Razorpay as its donation platform.

“Our donation form asks for information such as email address, phone number, PAN card number, and address. We still need to collect this information from our donors, as this is based on various Government regulations,” the statement said.

Our statement on Razorpay: pic.twitter.com/8tO4xusQS8

— Alt News (@AltNews) July 5, 2022

This came after AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair was arrested over a 2018 tweet. Following this, the Delhi police claimed on July 2 that Pravda Media — the parent company of AltNews — received donations from Pakistan, Syria, and other Gulf countries.

Zubair is a director at Pravda Media, and it is not allowed to get funds from non-Indian bank accounts as it doesn’t have an FCRA (Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act) license. Police have also added sections of the FCRA to the FIR.

AltNews had said in a statement dated July 4 that the platform has only received donations from Indian bank accounts.

"All of this is an attempt to shut down the very critical work that we do, and we will fight this attempt to shut us down and come out on top," the statement read.

The notice was extended to Razorpay to share data as part of this investigation.