Revolut Customer Loses £165,000 In Fraud: Blames Company For Poor Security

• A Revolut customer named Jack was recently scammed and a total of 165,000 was stolen from his accounts through 137 small transactions over a period of 23 minutes.
• Jack felt that if Revolut had better security and was more vigilant, this wouldn't have happened.
• Revolut has declined to comment and hasn't refunded the customer yet.

A Revolut customer was recently duped of 165,000 and he blames the company's inadequate security measures for it. The customer named Jack (he doesn't want to share his surname) runs an international business that requires him to hold multiple currencies in his Revolut account.

In February this year, he received a call from a scammer pretending to be from the Revolut team. He was informed that his account might have been compromised because it was used on shared WiFi.

Fearing that he was actually compromised, Jack shared some details that allowed the scammers to view his account, including all his transactions. Among those payments was a purchase of 21.98 from Etsy that he made that morning.

The scammers sent him a message asking him to confirm the amount with a 6-digit code. Since the message seemed to have come from Revolut, Jack believed it and shared the code with the caller.

However, what Jack did not know was that the code wasn't for confirmation. The scammers had set up their own account with the name Etsy" and the code that Jack shared was actually authenticating a new transaction.

After that two other Revolut texts reached him asking for a small fee under the name Revolut Fee and Revolut Fees Care, not knowing they were fake. Jack approved those transactions as well, accidentally setting up three new payees at the end of the process.

This is where the real nightmare began. Soon thousands of pounds began to flood out of his account in the form of smaller payments. Within a few moments, multiple transactions were made.

As soon as Jack realized that he was being scammed, he tried to contact Revolut's customer support team. However, he realized there was no call option, only a chat option in the app.

Still, he sent out a message saying I've been scammed, please freeze my account. It took 23 minutes for the concerned department to see this text and freeze his account which was enough time for the hackers to take out 165,000 from his account.

Read more: Revolut criticizes Meta's new collaborative approach to handling scams

Jack's Grievance Against Revolut

Jack believes that this whole incident is Revolut's fault.

• For starters, when you try to access a Revolut account from a different device, it asks for a selfie to authorize the setup. Jack did not provide any such selfie to the caller yet they were able to access his account, why?
• When he asked the Revolut team to show the picture that had been used to complete the setup, they said that these selfies were not stored on their servers. Hence, there is no way to know how they managed to bypass its facial authentication system.
• His second complaint is that within those 23 minutes, a total of 137 transactions were made. So many transactions within such a short period should have raised some concern. Most banks usually have a monitoring team that looks out for such unusual transactions.

What Does Revolut Have to Say About This?

Revolut hasn't made any comment on this case as it's being handled by the Financial Ombudsman Service. Revolut has yet to issue any refunds.

However, the UK has passed a new rule right now that requires banks and financial institutions to reimburse victims of fraud for up to 85,000. This fund will be split 50-50 between the sending and receiving firms. Whether this same rule will apply in Revolut's case or not is yet to be known.

Increasing Instances of Financial Fraud With Revolut

This isn't the first time that a Revolut customer has been scammed. In fact, this has become a common occurrence lately.

In 2023, the UK's national reporting center for fraud and cyber-crime Action Fraud received more than 10,000 reports of fraud against Revolut. BBC's Panorama investigated this matter and talked to 8 former employees to understand the root cause of the issue.

The investigation found that Revolut prioritizes expansion and launching new products over maintaining its current services.

However, Revolut has refuted all these rumors. It agreed that it has a high-performance culture" with an expectation to deliver good customer outcomes" but at the same time, it takes security very seriously.

All its new products go through an extensive risk assessment process and government approval before being released. In addition to that, it has built a financial crime prevention team that makes up a third of its workforce.

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