Revolut Grapples With Rise in Scams

Criminals are often operating on the dark web. So with the people that I spoke to, they received a phone call. And it seemed to be someone who's very authoritative. One person said they were called by someone who claimed they were from Revolut's fraud team. And they told them, you're going to be a victim of a Bitcoin scam or crypto scam. You're going to lose thousands of money. You have to act urgently. Let me help you. And this person was taken through. The victim was taken through a process where the person down the line was guiding them and telling them to download software that they said would help them prevent this fraud. They said lawyers from the other banks are contacting them. And so the person panicked. And so they downloaded the chat. And they believed that they were being helped because they were a new Revolut customer. And then over the course of a few minutes, they lost thousands. They lost over 10,000 pounds. And that's a similar story that we've seen again and again. Fraud isn't a problem, though, just for Revolut customers. Why are people filing complaints about Revolut over this issue? Absolutely. This is an issue that is impacting the entire banking industry. But the reason why there are a lot of complaints against Revolut is that, well, no bank actually has to cover fraud losses at the moment. But Revolut isn't part of a voluntary scheme where they do refund customers. And as a result, they are not held liable at the moment. And so they throw out a lot of these cases when customers do complain. And so the customers have nowhere else to go. So they turn to the financial ombudsman service. And that is why we've seen Revolut, or the data that I've seen from last year, they've leapfrogged their rivals. Okay, so what's Revolut doing about it? So that's a good question. So I spoke to Revolut's fraud team and was given access to their war room where they're tackling fraud and saw some of the demos in which they're trying to alert customers more and more. And they've introduced a lot more AI modeling in order to pick out anomalous payments. They've also introduced more sort of biometric authorizations. But also they're investing heavily into their team. Woody Maloof told me they have now like a 4,000 strong team. And again, they're just like investing a lot more in the technology. But for them, they said, if they've told the customers enough times and they still proceed to make that payment, it's outside of their sort of risk appetite.