Scam complaints from Revolut users have more than doubled since 2020, as victims warn against prioritising convenience over security.
Complaints made to the Financial Ombudsman of “authorised” scams on the platform, when a person is tricked into sending money to a fraudster, have gone from 242 to 516 in just two years.
This compares with Monzo, which had 274 new complaints to the ombudsman so far in this financial year, or Starling, which had 193 in the same period.
Separately, Revolut suffered a data breach of tens of thousands of customers’ personal data in Sept 2022 following a cyber attack.
Tara, who lost £2,000 in an authorised push payment (APP) scam over the app, told The Telegraph: “All along, I should have just trusted a larger, more well-known institution, which just wouldn’t have data breaches of this scale.
“I prioritised convenience and I should have prioritised security.”
Fraudsters tricking people into moving money
Revolut, which is an Financial Conduct Authority authorised institution, offers bank accounts, debit cards, fee-free currency exchange, stock trading, cryptocurrency exchange and peer-to-peer payments on its app.
A recent fund-raising valued the company at £24 billion, making it worth more than NatWest and transforming it into Britain’s most valuable fintech firm of all time.
However, the digital banking upstart has not been granted a banking licence in the UK, despite its last application being in Jan 2021.
Additionally, in recent months, the company has faced setbacks after losing its money laundering reporting officer, chief risk officer and data protection officer in the UK.
In the last six months in Britain, Revolut has seen fraud attempts on its customers nearly triple. However, due to new interventions including more targeted and sophisticated warnings, there has been a 24 per cent decrease in customers falling victim to these attacks.
Aaron Elliott-Gross, head of fraud and financial crime at Revolut, told The Telegraph: “The number of times that we’ve seen some of our customers exposed to these types of frauds and scams has definitely been increasing over the last year or two.
“Fraudsters and scammers are really good at taking current events and current affairs and turning it to their advantage and trying to trick people essentially into moving money that they really shouldn’t be. For example, we saw a large increase in fraud and scams related to Covid.
“There is no situation where the bank is going to call you and say ‘there’s something happening internally that means you need to move your money to another account’, it won’t happen.”
He added: “There’s no difference in terms of data security, data privacy or anything like that, between Revolut or a traditional financial institution.”
To combat the fraudsters, Revolut has recently introduced increased security checks on the platform, including notifying users with multiple full-page pop-up warnings before they make the transactions.
“The warnings – the interventions – are generally better than industry,” said Mr Elliott-Gross, adding that the new “more sophisticated warnings” have resulted in consumers making the right decision “over 95 per cent of the time”.
