Five steps to secure payment webhooks and prevent fraudulent order fulfilment

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A developer behind Saturdays, a food-order platform using PhonePe, has outlined a multi-step approach to safely handling payment webhooks. The core problem is that a webhook is essentially an unverified claim from an external sender, and naively trusting it can allow anyone to mark orders as paid. The recommended process includes logging raw request bytes, authenticating the sender, independently querying the gateway's status API, locking the order row before a final state check, and comparing the confirmed payment amount against the stored order total. Critically, the payment amount is always computed server-side from the order record and never accepted from the client. These measures together prevent duplicate fulfilment, fraud, and silent mismatches that would otherwise require manual reconciliation.

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