Crediwatch (CW), a digital trust platform, has developed tools to help validate medical service providers for Covid-19 relief across India, in a bid to combat fraud in relief efforts. CW aims to enable Covid-19 relief workers, doctors, hospitals and resource teams to quickly ascertain the bonafides of a supplier of medical supplies such as liquid oxygen, medicines, surgical masks and so on.
Unfortunately, this crisis has seen bad actors take advantage of relief work. For example, bogus suppliers have not delivered medical oxygen that they were paid for by aid organisations. Many fraudsters have emerged who claim to offer a service and fail to deliver after collecting premium payments for it.
“Validation of supplier or vendor information on relief networks and websites is a manual process, making it time consuming. This is diverting our resources and reducing the impact of relief work at a crucial time. As startups and business leaders, we realise that we are in a position to impact this unprecedented situation positively,” said Meghna Suryakumar, founder and CEO, Crediwatch.
Since the onset of the pandemic, public, private and civic organisations have circulated information about hospital bed availability, medical supplies such as oxygen, masks, sanitiser and so on. This information is largely crowdsourced and has been a collective effort of several voluntary groups, including the startup community, stepping up to help society at large. However, much of this information is being shared without adequate verification on social media, messaging platforms and through relief networks.
