Unable to receive OTP

[Pavani]

Hello Team,

I have been having issues in receiving OTP from my international bank. I had infact been receiving them until April 22nd and it stopped all of a sudden post that.  I had called the customer service thrice and each time the call was closed without any solution and no one reached out to me to offer an explanation as well.  The call that i had yesterday was the most absurd one,  the  technician with whom i was talking to ,put me on hold for a long time trying to get a manager online and call was cut abruptly without any callbacks . 

I had given exact timelines of when the OTP was tried and still everytime I get a standard answer that some internal message delivery tool which is used to check if message is delivered or not, is down . 

I have had lengthy calls with my bank as well and they gave me the exact times when the OTP was delivered without me mentioning it to them . And the most wierd part is , my husband and I have the same bank, and he is able to receive the OTP on his koodo number succesfully , while I am not able to get from fido. 

Can you please resolve this issue asap. 

[mapleplusmandar]

I was able to receive netcodes from Commonwealth Bank of Australia for a while but it stopped working for me all of a sudden. 

I contacted the bank on Monday, August 7, 2023, and they confirmed everything was all good on their end; their system was able to generate a code and the status of the code was sent, when I tried it while I had the rep on the phone. 

It never occured to me that when I googled 'unable to receive OTPs' that there are so many FIDO users who are impacted to varying degrees by this nuisance. The interesting story is, however, my friend who is also banking with the Australian bank, has no issue with receiving the OTPs. 

For me to be able to contact the customer service of the Australian bank, I called into Fido to purchase an add-on service so I can get a cheaper rate; that seems to be futile now, considering every one on the platform is literally confirming that the issue lies with FIDO. 

Could you actually be able to resolve the thorny issue that is impacting your customers? If not, then I, for one, will switch to another provider. Period. If I am able to succeed in that, I will post here and on my social media platforms. If a possible exodus of users from Fido to other providers occurs, that is never my intention. 

[Cawtau]

Hello Mapleplusmandar,

  I replied to your other post here.

  If you wish to contact the Australian Bank, I believe you might be able to do so by reversing the charges from a landline (see here).

Hope this helps 😀

Cheers

[Pavani]

Hello,

The bank in question is Citibank India. No it does not come as a short code (although short code of citibank is in approved list). Like I mentioned above, I have been getting the one time password until April  ,the Last one being on April 21st (4:15-4:17 PM PST) . After this date &timestamp I stopped receiving. 

[FidoPhilippe · Accepted solution]

Hey @Pavani! Welcome to the community.

I'll be happy to see what I can do to help. I'll need some more information though:

1. Does the OTP your bank sends you use a short code?
2. If they do, can it be found on the list found here?
3. What the name of the international bank in question?

Short codes that are not on this list will simply mean that they are not approved in Canada. If that is the case, we would suggest to contact your bank for another authentication method.

[Pavani]

hello, is there any update on this ?

[FidoPhilippe]

Thanks for that @Pavani!

Can you confirm the number the message is being sent from please?

Do you have any similar problems with any other orginisation (I assume you can send and receive international texts without issue)?

Also, can you provide the make and OS version of the phone you're using?

Thanks!

[Pavani]

Hello,

the numbers change each time , but in the past it usually used to come from +1 313 *** **** or +1 317 *** **** .  I have an Iphone 13 pro max with a software version of 15.5.

[Cawtau]

Hello Pavani,

Thank you for the additional information. While those numbers might appear to be phone numbers in a phone, is it possible there are not? From what you note, the bank in question is Citibank in India. However, the +1 designation would be for North America. Also, the 313 and 317 area codes would appear to be from Detroit, MI and Indianapolis, IN, respectively. On the other hand, phones occasionally might mistakenly misalign the numbers. For example, a code with a similar number of digits might show in an actual phone number format.

While it is possible Citibank India forwards OTP through Citibank in the United States, their SMS banking serivce seems to use a number from India (ie +91)(see here). If you do not wish to include the full numbers publically, you might consider contacting customer service to provide the full number. In addition, they can also be contacted via Live Chat, Facebook, or Twitter. Those methods can be accessed via the contact page posted above. They might be better able to trace the OTP messages given the full number.

Hope this helps 😀

Cheers

[Pavani]

Thanks for the response, All Citibank India recipients who have configured a Canada or US number in their account to receive OTP's would receive it from a US number. I have contacted the cusotmer service multiple times and each time they hung up on me abruptly without a call back and the case was closed without a proper reasoning. I tried receiving an OTP while in the call with the customer service  and even asked them to track live to see if they see any hits. I am surprised each time i call , the internal SMS tracking portal of Fido is always down and they are not able to track a message. The last numbers 7 digits always change and that is why i have hidden it . I do not know from which exact number i would recieve an OTP ,except for the first 3 digits. 

Yes the SMS banking numbers for is 52484 or +91 9880752484   and as mentioned in the site , when we do the following

OTP <last4digitsofcard> to +91 9880752484 or 52484,  OTP is sent from an US number, which is blocked or filtered somewhere by the Carrier. In the last one year never faced any issues until April (Last one being on April 21st (4:15-4:17 PM PST))

[Cawtau]

Hello again,

Thank you again for the additional information. I understand you have contacted customer service many times. However, it might still be useful to provide them with the full phone number. It's possible those particular phone numbers were mistakenly flagged as being SPAM and blocked by the network. It's also possible those numbers were being spoofed at some point to send SPAM and blocked for that reason.

I understand your situation might be frustrating having to contact customer service. However, they only way they might be able to offer a solution is to provide them with as much information as possible.

Hope this helps 😀

Cheers

[FidoStephane]

The short code the OTP is being delivered from should be the same each time. 

Do you see the short code in this list: https://www.txt.ca/en/current-short-code-programs/

[Pavani]

As explained above, OTP does not come from a short code, it comes from a regular 10 digit US number. For safety none of the banks use the same number to deliver OTP's ,which is a standard practice. 

[Cawtau]

Hello again,

---

@Pavani wrote:

... For safety none of the banks use the same number to deliver OTP's ,which is a standard practice. 

---

  I'm not sure that statement is entirely true. All of my OTPs from local banks, credit cards, or PayPal, or Amazon, or eBay, etc are sent from their same respective short-codes. Granted, it may be a different situation with regards to OTPs from phone numbers, but they would still have designated numbers to send from.

Hope this helps 😀

Cheers

[PawanSoobhri]

Hi, I am also facing the same issue. I checked with my CitiBank in India and they did confirmed me that they sent the OTP from their side (I also checked by asking time which matched with my request).

In past I was with Telus and I use to recieve the OTPs but since I koved to Fido, the OTP stopped recieving.

I would request Fido team to please look into this at the earliest.

[FidoStephane]

Hi there @PawanSoobhri

If none of the above suggestions helped, we would recommend you contact our technical support team to have this looked into.

You can reach them over chat on Fido.ca, or you can schedule a call with them by dialing *611 from your Fido phone  

[PawanSoobhri]

I tried but as usual did not got any solution to it.

[FidoVan]

Hi there,

Are you also receiving OTPs from phone numbers and not short codes?

If you are getting them from phone numbers, like Cawtau said, it's possible those particular phone numbers were mistakenly flagged as being SPAM and blocked by our network. The best thing to do is to provide those numbers to our technical suppor team so they can investigate.

All short codes that are not on this list will simply mean that they are not approved in Canada. If that is the case, we would suggest to contact your bank for another authentication method.