BBC Panorama to feature Revolut safety

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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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, claimed that in scams of other banks, the money is disproportionately sent on to Revolut accounts before being withdrawn.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?
 
Setforlife said:
hopefully they got a whistleblower of some sort
Click to expand...

They had spoken to 8 former employees, but they did not say anything that meaningful. Their comments were mainly that it was a pressurised environment aimed at growth.

One employee said that there was a trade-off between growing the business by allowing people to register easily and having "fences" in place to deter fraudsters from registering. They lowered these fences to make it easy to open accounts knowing that this risked more fraudsters registering.

But no one came out saying "There was a weakness in the IT systems" or the policy was "refuse all refunds".
 
It seemed to be a hatchet job on Revolut. I feel sorry for the victims, but it was their own fault. Even their ‘evidence’ of selfie fraud was tenuous to put it mildly.
 
Thinking of my BOI account here in comparison - if someone else manages to get me to reveal my userid and PIN, as well as a one-time SMS code, then they could register a new device. But even then, there is a 4-hour security delay before the app can be used on the new device.

Firebreaks like this are very simple, pragmatic security measures that should reduce fraud if used more widely.
 
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Business banking customers deal with their relationship managers primarily by phone - two way contact. Stopping that would be crazy.
 
The reality is that a large part of the population use Revolut quite successfully and happily with no issues - fraud or otherwise.
 
Mrs Gekko’s Revolut was targeted last night as it happens. A 10c fraudulent transaction was attempted at 1am and Revolut’s systems picked it up and blocked it. There are messages in the app and an email which she’s going to show me.
 
ClubMan said:
it's very difficult to tell from the various, usually vague or selective,
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I have absolutely no doubt that the victims did something that they should not have done. Their phone or laptop was compromised. They thought they were talking to Revolut but they were not and stupidly gave out a One Time Code.

And this happens with the other banks as well.

But the difference is that as soon as the person realises that they have been scammed, if they ring AIB or BoI they get through to a person who immediately tries to recall the money.

With Revolut, they cannot get through to a person and are just routinely told that it was their own fault and Revolut does not appear to make any effort trying to limit the damage.

Scammers know this and target Revolut customers as they are more likely to get away with it.
 
Revolut is probably the best service for security.

In the app there is a list of transactions which you can chose to block or allow.
The card can be frozen and unfrozen in an instant.

You can totally block up all types of transactions and unblock them instantly.

I operate my Revolut account this way. Very little effort is needed.

If I am making a purchase online at the payment stage I open my Revolut app, unfreeze the card, do the payment and refreeze the card.

The same can be done for an ATM withdrawal or over the counter transaction.

Revolut is a great service.
 
Even just the fact you get a notification whenever there is a transcation is a huge safety feature. If my card gets used fradulenty I will know straight away and can go and freeze/block it. If the same happens to my EBS card, I have no idea anything has happened until I log on to my online banking.
 
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