Another Day

Another scam.

A man who had £165,000 stolen from his Revolut business account by fraudsters has told BBC Panorama he believes the company’s security measures failed to prevent the theft.

He says criminals managed to bypass the ID verification process to gain access to his account.

So far, Revolut has refused to refund this money.

The BBC has found that Revolut was named in more reports of fraud in the last financial year than any of the major High Street banks.

The e-money firm – which has not yet been granted full status as a bank – says it takes fraud incredibly seriously and that it has “robust controls” to meet its legal and regulatory obligations.

Given the behaviour of the main banks recently, such startups are a refreshing thing to see. An option should one be debanked for wrongthink. So what did they do wrong?

In February, Jack was in a co-working space when he received a phone call from a scammer pretending to be from Revolut. He was told he was being called because his account might have been compromised through being on shared Wi-Fi.

Facepalm. What part of no legitimate business calls you out of the blue like this does he not understand? At this point any rational person would be terminating the call because it is an obvious scam.

Jack was tricked into handing over enough information to allow the scammers to put his Revolut account onto their device. This meant they could see all his previous transactions, including a purchase at the online retailer Etsy that morning.

While Jack was still on the phone to the scammers, a text message from Revolut arrived, asking him to confirm the exact same amount he had spent – £21.98 – by typing in a six-digit security code.

He said, “Yes, that was me,” and read out the code to the scammers.

So entirely his fault. He bypassed the security by going along with someone who called him out of the blue, that he knew nothing about and just asked him for the details the needed to scam him. In what way was this Revolut’s fault? Okay, the transactions should have triggered a response much more quickly and the matter of the fake selfie is a weakness, but none of this would have been a problem if Jack had just hung up the phone to the scammers in the first place. He is responsible for his loss.