'I lost £165k to fraud in an hour' – customers say they were let down by Revolut | Hacker News Reader

'I lost £165k to fraud in an hour' – customers say they were let down by Revolut

bbc.com

9 pointsjamesblonde8 comments

There were similar issues with Bunq in The Netherlands. You (or a scammer) could turn a savings account into a checking account pretty much immediately with one code, and then drain it in the matter of minutes. Lot of people lost their life savings over it and of course no one you could reach out to to rectify the situation. All other Dutch banks have waiting periods for this. E.g. ING has a four hour waiting period to increase your transaction limit, just so it buys time when potential scams are happening.

Of course it's easy to blame the user for this as they provide codes and stuff, but when one bank has this issue so much more than it should have given its amount of customers, something else is going on.

Anyone have a prediction whether digital only financial institutions are a thing in 10 years?

With what AI can do now in presenting itself as a human better than most humans - not sure how you could possibly identify humans at scale…

I think there will always be some component of physical locations. You have to tie the real life identity to digital one at some point.

I think purely digital ones will not survive due to stricter KYC guidelines that could come.

But expecting much of any service outside KYC and maybe largest transactions is fools errand.

This problem goes beyond banks to the very core of all we do. How do you know you are talking to a real coworker on zoom?

Maybe governments will create real digital IDs and ubikey like devices and also backed up by phone 2fa etc. The more accounts you need to hack to impersonate someone the harder these attacks will be.

Shit almost 0.1% of money deposited to Revolut is defrauded.

I’m sorry but that’s just a plain gullible user.

He gave the scammers enough info to stick his account onto their phone AND authorised the transfer via auth code too?!?

That really doesn’t feel like Revolut’s fault. No point in more security if the user actively helps the scammers around it

If it takes 23 mins to freeze an account through a chat option I guess revolut is not good, my plain old bank has a phone help line I can call from everywhere in the world to freeze everything immediately

They should probably refund the money taken during the time the customer was trying to contact them, it's just another tech company thinking that customer care is a disease

My plain old bank also requires a new code for each transaction even if you have the app enabled, so that's another point, I really would suggest people to steer far away from these new challenger banks

If the notification you get to setup a new app can be custom, instead of the device's name, like in this case it was presented as "Etsy" I guess it's another security concern, seems that Revolut doesn't take fraud or scam in consideration AT ALL, what they mean "very seriously"

The scam was sophisticated and unfortunately most banks are not sophisticated. They call you up and expect you to give them loads of personal details because tbey have some upsell for you. They train people to be scammed. They should instead call and tell you to call them back at their official telephone number.

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