BBC Panorama to feature Revolut safety tomorrow night

The main way of contacting customers should be through the banking app and failing that by post, if necessary asking people to call their bank. Most banking fraud starts with a phone call, and distinguishing between genuine and fraudulent calls can be hard.
 
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The main way of contacting customers should be through the banking app and failing that by post, if necessary asking people to call their bank. Most banking fraud starts with a phone call, and for many people there's no foolproof way of distinguishing between genuine and fraudulent calls.
This is not helped by the biggest mobile operator Vodafone regularly cold calling existing customers with new offers. They then say they need to verify details for security and data protection and proceed to ask your name, address, dob and name on the account.
I always refuse and tell them I don't know who they are. They get annoyed and give me a number to ring them back on. What is the point in that ? If I want to ring them back I'll go and find their number myself. I do know they are genuine calls.
What they are doing is totally irresponsible and teaching poor security behaviour to a large chunk of the population. But they don't care , it has been happening for years.

So little wonder that Joe Bloggs who got such a call and had no issue may accept a similar scam call from their "bank"
 
3 victims, all of whom had business accounts and lost sums of £25,000 , and £144,000. One was a tech journalist.

At least the programme was clear, all three were at fault. There was none of the "I gave no one authority to make payments from my account" that we see in most reports.

Two of them just took phone calls and did what they were told by the scammer. I feel sorry for them, but they are business people and should be more alert. Having said that, if you are very busy and distracted, you guard would be down.

In the £25,000 case, she gave them control of her computer. She appeared to give them one Code number from her phone, but they used that to make multiple payments. Maybe that was just to set up the payee.

The £144,000 guy had his account added to another payment method and the scammer fooled the face ID scanner. A tech expert said that this has been easy to do until recently, but Revolut has since installed measures to stop it.

A guy who represents customers who have been refused refunds , claimed that in scams of other banks, the money is disproportionately sent on to Revolut accounts before being withdrawn.
 
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Lessons, which most of us already know.

1) If you get a call from Revolut, it's probably a scammer
2) Do not give anyone a code that is sent to your phone
3) Revolut is no substitute for a proper bank account
4) You should not have a business account with Revolut
5) You should not have large sums of money in your Revolut account
6) Things do go wrong and when they go wrong, Revolut is not set up to help minimise the damage
 
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So is Revolut to blame for any of this or is it the customers' fault?

The fault lies mainly with the customers who allowed themselves to be scammed.

But Revolut should be required to improve their systems.

1) There should be dedicated fraud phone number which is answered quickly so that people can freeze their cards and payments can be traced quickly. A chatbot is no substitute for dealing with a real person when it comes to fraud.
2) The Revolut systems don't seem to detect fraudulent payments. A new account was set up and £144,000 was paid out to it in multiple payments in a few minutes. Revolut should have frozen that card.
 
The programme gave out a lot of statistics to show that Revolut is the most complained about.

More money per £m of payments is lost in Revolut than in any other bank.

But the programme did not ask why this is.
Is it a systems problem with Revolut?
Is it the demographic that are more into tech and trust everything? Although the three victims in the programme were in their 40s I am guessing.
Is Revolut slower to follow up and retrieve the money before it's moved on again?
 
Let's say I fall for a scam.
And after putting the phone down I say "That doesn't sound right".
I ring AIB and say "I transferred €5,000 just now and I think I have been scammed."
They say "That went to a Bank of Ireland account in the name of John Doe - we will tell BoI to stop it".

So is that why more is lost through Revolut? People can't get through to people to stop the money being sent on?
 
A solution, for all banks, would be to offer customers the option that all payments over a certain limit are delayed 24 hours.

If the customer waives that option, then they have no right to refunds.
 
Then people would complain that their house purchase or whatever is delayed due to an anti-fraud delay!
True and agree with the general premise. However what is the limit on inter account transactions via Revolut? (Genuine question)

AIB have a limit on personal accounts of 10k per day, which I assume don't impact a lot of people on a day to day basis.

Completing a house purchase this year, I had to go into the AIB Branch to transfer the remaining deposit (significantly >10k)via a paper form. (To the point that I was super nervous about transferring large amounts of money via a form that I filled out ink wise)

Checks and balances.... which I'm sure are imperfect but there is no way I could do same with Revolut.
 
True and agree with the general premise. However what is the limit on inter account transactions via Revolut? (Genuine question)

Are there limits for sending a bank transfer?​

Limits depend on destination country and currency

Most currencies have no transfer limits. We’ll show you any exceptions in-app before you send money.
 
My main account is with AIB and I have found this limit a minor irritation a few times.

And like you, when transferring a large amount in the branch, I was worried that I had put in all the numbers correctly.
100% agreed! Filling out a paper form with my crappy hand writing... That 10k limit might have contained the loss that the businesses sustained.

Am I correct in saying that AIB caps Business Sepa transfers to 30k per day?


Side note in terms of smart device payments they seem to be capped by the bank itself:

 
100% agreed! Filling out a paper form with my crappy hand writing... That 10k limit might have contained the loss that the businesses sustained.
I've had to do large transfers in branch with PTSB a few times. Tens to hundreds of thousands. In all cases a staff member double checked the form details, a more senior staff member signed off on it, and I was also asked to double check and initial all relevant details. The chances of any mistakes were very low.
 
The chances of any mistakes were very low.
Spot on! I was the same double checking every box, letter and figure.

Which I'm sure we'd agree isn't a thing with Neo/Digital banks whatever you call them. It's just too easy to transfer vast amounts of money across the interweb and it's just gone. With no recourse it seems in certain circumstances, although when you give your keys to your castle financially you are part of the problem.

TLDR a) At least AIB's/others transaction limits might have helped, b) Why did Revolut not flag the transactions and c) If I was scammed I'd from experience, the main banks (AIB/BOI) will deal with it quickly.

Edit: To deal with the erroneous smiley
 
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