Victims who have lost thousands of pounds in a cruel scam that sees fraudsters impersonate their bank have slammed Revolut for their response.
Using a spoofed phone number that looks like it is from the e-money institution, scammers are convincing customers to hand over a One Time Passcode (OTP) to register devices with Apple Pay, before downloading the cards on to their own phones.
The fraudsters then go on shopping sprees costing thousands in high-end stores, draining the victim’s bank account.
And Revolut has been heavily criticised for its customer service, as victims complain that its live chat sent them around in circles – with one saying that the challenger bank blames its customers.
The e-money institution, which does not have a UK banking licence, was founded in 2015 by former Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers trader Nik Storonsky, 38, and Vlad Yatsenko, 39.
Daria Tymicka (pictured) had just finished studying game design at the University of Worcester when she lost nearly £10,000 that she had saved while working as a restaurant supervisor
Revolut was founded in 2015 by former Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers trader Nik Storonsky, 38, and Vlad Yatsenko, 39 (file image)
One Apple Pay fraud victim, Harvey Austen, 18, says he lost £1,750 to the scam in January and was forced to give up his car – sending his credit score tumbling.
He had to ask his parents for a loan to cover getting to work because he could barely afford the 90-minute train journey.
‘Because my car insurance was paid monthly and because I’m 18 it was about £4,000 pounds a year roughly for a 2006 Vauxhall Corsa, and that was a credit agreement.
‘It damaged my credit score. Horribly. I went from a good score to almost the bottom of poor.
‘I’ve settled the debt now with the insurer and I did manage to get a new car recently, thanks to a lender but it’s high APR, hugely high APR.’
The Kent-based construction project coordinator said the challenger bank hadn’t taken his financial circumstances into account.
‘It’s really hard to get by and Revolut haven’t put that into consideration at all, that people are in a cost-of-living crisis.
‘I mentioned this to them, in my live chat with them and they shared no care in the world about that. They couldn’t be less interested if they tried to, quite frankly.
‘They show no regard whatsoever for the actual human side of things. There’s no way you can talk to them on the phone, there’s no physical branch.
‘They don’t refund for fraud and they blame the customer,’ the 18-year-old said.
Ukrainian mother-of-two who came to the UK as a refugee scammed out of £6,000 by fraudsters pretending to be from HMRC
Dinara Loktionova, 37, a Ukrainian mother-of-two, said she was threatened with five years in prison by fraudsters pretending to be from HMRC
Dinara Loktionova, 37, who moved with her two children to the UK in April 2022 following the outbreak of was in February 2022, said the scammers had told her she had an unpaid tax bill.
She paid nearly £6,000 and borrowed thousands from a Ukrainian friend before realising it was a scam and she thinks she was targeted because she is a refugee.
The software developer and tester, who is working for a UK-based company but was a lecturer in her home country, was threatened with deportation and prison by the cruel fraudsters.
NatWest have promised to refund her the £998 she paid and Revolut will pay back £4,800 after she made a formal complaint to the e-money institution.
Originally the challenger bank told her ‘there was nothing they could do’.
Mrs Loktionova’s husband is serving in military intelligence in Ukraine and she was worried that without the money she saved she would not be able to help him if he is injured or reach her parents in an emergency situation.
‘I saved this money to share with my parents. To be more confident here in this country.
‘They think Ukrainians are a better target audience for frauds because there are a lot of single mothers with children in the country who are scared to be sent to prison,’ she explained.
Figures from scam reporting body Action Fraud show that frauds involving OTPs are on the rise, with 538 reported in 2021 and 742 in 2022.
And recent figures for Revolut suggest it has been struggling with protecting customers against fraud, with the number of crime reports made to Action Fraud ballooning to 7,198 last year, up 81 per cent from 3,975 in 2021.
That was the fourth highest figure for any firm offering current account-style services, trailing only Barclays, Lloyds and Santander.
The data also accounts for cases where the fraudsters funnel money through Revolut accounts or in when an identity has been stolen and a fake account set up.
The financial firm, which offers current account services but is not a bank in the UK, announced in early March that it would be getting its banking licence ‘imminently’.
Challenger banks are relatively small retail banks set up to compete with larger more traditional financial institutions.
Revolut – worth £28billion according to its most recent valuation – reported its first ever profit, of £26million, for 2021 in February, as turnover tripled to £636m during the cryptocurrency boom.
The challenger bank is not signed up to the Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM) in the UK, a voluntary agreement between banks that they will repay victims of some kinds of fraud.
Heather Buchanan, executive policy director for the APPG on Fair Business Banking, said at the end of March: ‘I’d be utterly gobsmacked if Revolut is welcomed into the licensed banking sector.
‘We could be letting in a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I don’t think that would end well at all for the sheep.’
And many of those who have lost money to scams using the platform agree.
Daria Tymicka had just finished studying game design at the University of Worcester when she lost nearly £10,000 that she had saved while working as a restaurant supervisor.
She’d carefully put aside the money to pay for expensive graphic design packages when she graduated so that she could build a portfolio of work.
But the scammers – who knew her address in the UK, her address in her home country of Poland and both of her phone numbers – spent £9,330 in Selfridges after connecting to her Apple Pay in September 2022, decimating her savings.
She says Revolut told her they hadn’t detected fraudulent activity on her account and that she must have made the payment – more than a two hour drive away from where she was at the time.
Revolut, which holds a banking licence in the EU, initially rejected her dispute in a typo-ridden email, saying: ‘After a careful investigation, we have identified that the transaction(s) you’ve marked as unrecognised must have been performed contactless through your [sic].
‘Since you’ve indicated that this device remains in your possession, we can only conclude that the transaction was carried out by yourself.’
Revolut also rejected her formal complaint although it did eventually accept that she had not made the payment.
Daria, now living in Glasgow, had to chase Revolut through the Bank of Lithuania because her account is based in the EU.
‘I think they need better warnings. I wasn’t expecting them to refund me 100 per cent because I knew it was my mistake.
‘But my friend, she had an account with another bank and then two years ago she received a phone call with a scam as well and she basically gave someone all these card details. They spent thousands and the bank repaid him 80 per cent.’
But the Bank of Lithuania dismissed her claims for a refund, meaning that she would have to take Revolut to court to try and get her money back; something she doesn’t have the resources to do.
‘It’s been so long now. The first two, three months were very hard – a lot of crying. At this point it is just good that people will know.
‘My mother said: “At least it’s not health, it’s just money, money comes and goes.” This is something I need to realise for the rest of my life.’
Mikhail Moudrakovski, 36, a Wimbledon-based management consultant who specialises in customer service, lost £3,600 to the fraud.
Mikhail Moudrakovski (pictured), 36, said the fraudsters were some of the best customer service people he’d come across
Co-Founder Nikolay Storonsky has previously blasted the Financial Conduct Authority for being slow with Revolut’s UK banking licence (pictured in 2018)
After checking the number online, he was certain he was speaking to the Revolut fraud team.
He said the scammers had been so convincing that he had transferred more money to Revolut out of another bank account because they’d told him it would be safer there.
The fraudsters even said he needed to delete the Revolut app from his phone to reduce the risk of it being hacked while they ‘secured’ his account.
‘They went on a little bit of a spree. At that point I became livid. I remember my wife told me she had never seen my face so red when I ran into the kitchen,’ Mikhail said.
‘I went through it with a few senior colleagues at work and they said, “You’re going to get your money back, they’re liable for this,” but of course Revolut did absolutely everything to avoid that.
How to keep your money where you want it – in YOUR bank account
Cyber security expert James Bore said the new challenger banks and e-money institutions have not been properly investing in anti-fraud measures
Cybersecurity expert James Bore explained the simple rules he follows to stop scammers.
- Keep a small amount of money in Revolut and similar platforms
Use the app like a cash wallet, James advises, to minimise the risk of large losses.
- Use one-off cards for online payment and subscriptions to protect your data from leaks
Revolut allows users to generate one-off cards with new numbers for transactions. The platform
- Do not trust that the number on your phone is the bank calling
If you are called out of the blue, ask the agent for a reference number, hang up and then call the bank on the number that is listed on their website or on your card.
If it is your bank calling, the person on the phone will be perfectly happy to assist you.
If it is a fraudster, they will try to keep you on the phone. Hang up immediately and report the incident to your bank or e-money platform.
‘They kept putting me through this very brutal, slow answering system of chat messages, “We’re escalating, we’re escalating, yes, no, maybe,” and obviously at the end of every chat there slowly came this rejection and I think they were trying to wear me out.
‘It was a very dark week, the week that I was talking to Revolut with this hope that they would do something about it. I remember I was very low, like I had been betrayed because I had trusted Revolut for my money for so long.’
The customer service expert said he thought the fraudsters had offered better service than the e-money institution.
‘The scammers had made me feel so secure which is so funny because it was the opposite of Revolut’s customer service which was incredibly insecure because they gave me vague answers, they wouldn’t help me in any way.
‘There were so many tricks. I was actually very impressed by them, to be honest. The sophistication of that manipulation; I felt very clever.’
He explained how the scammers had played on his emotions to convince him that he needed to trust them.
‘Everyone makes every decision, every customer, even in business-to-business transactions are made with tons of emotional background.
‘We think we are rational people but we are actually making our purchases and commitments very much based on emotion. That was an extremely emotional event for me. That’s about as emotional as it gets in terms of interacting with a business.’
Mr Moudrakovski added that Revolut was risking losing more customers with its customer service.
‘All of those key points where you have got to step it up or you’re not just going to lose the customer, you’re going to have these runaway stories where people just want to tell the world about how bad your business is. That’s really damaging for your business’ reputation.
‘Revolut is literally hiding. When I was trying to interact with them, I was like, how do I talk to someone, and I could never get a voice interaction.’
Cristina Murroni, 57, who was the victim of an Authorised Push Payment fraud through her Revolut account and lost nearly £10,000, has started a Facebook group for victims.
She said that she had been shocked by the number of people who had reached out to her and said that they were ‘traumatised’ by their experiences.
‘We are traumatised. Told one thing when the reality was another one.
‘There are allegations – although they are only allegations – that maybe Revolut really has such weak defences on its system that it has become one of the scammers’ favourite platforms.’
Ms Murroni said she had been disappointed with Revolut’s response and has taken them to the Financial Ombudsman and will receive their decision shortly.
A spokesman for Revolut said it had introduced stronger and clearer warnings and new ‘enhanced’ interventions for payments made in a digital wallet (file image)
‘The human link is always the weakest link in security. So you have got to re-enforce exactly that point. And Revolut is very far from state of the art.’
The business-owner said she had ‘learnt a lesson’ from the scam and understood better how people can be so vulnerable to fraud.
‘So in one way, I know I sound like a real yoga person, but it was a lesson in humility. I thought it would never happen to me and I now know how vulnerable people feel and it’s not a nice feeling.
‘It’s a good human lesson but I don’t want to pay that big a price for it.’
A spokesman for UK Finance, the trade association that represents the financial services sector said: ‘Fraud has a devastating impact on victims and the banking industry’s primary focus is protecting customers from fraud happening in the first place.
‘Criminals are sophisticated and will make every attempt to steal your personal and financial information, often by purporting to be your bank to gain your trust.
‘It is important to remember that your bank will never ask you to share your full PIN, password or OTP.’
A spokesman for Revolut said it had introduced stronger and clearer warnings and new ‘enhanced’ interventions for payments made in a digital wallet like Apple Pay.
The spokesman said Revolut takes the protection of its customers ‘extremely seriously’ and said it was vital that criminals were stopped at the source.
It said customers would never be contacted by phone if they had not first been contacted through the Revolut live chat.
The e-money institution added that it considers reimbursement on a case-by-case basis and looks at the effectiveness of its own warnings along with the actions of the customer.
