Scammers drain woman’s Revolut account and fintech comes looking for more

Friday, October 13th turned out to be very unlucky for a reader called Clodagh, as that was the day the scammers came calling.

“I got a phone call from someone claiming to be from Revolut asking had I bought something from Amazon for €79.99,” her mail starts.

“I said ‘no’ so they said ‘Let me refund you that money’ and asked me to log in to Revolut. I was then guided by them through different pages and they got me to delete cards and add cards to my account. I honestly thought they were from Revolut so did everything that was asked of me, including entering passwords.”

She says that “by that stage I had passed the two-factor authentication and they had access to my account. I had saved €10 each week into three vaults. It was week 40 and I had €400 in each vault. I did ask how could I be sure who they were and he gave me his employee ID number, name, and told me that he had a wife and two kids. I begged him not to rob me and right in front of my eyes I saw my vaults emptying, leaving me with a zero balance in all three.”

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Clodagh then realised what was happening and rang AIB, where she has her main accounts, and told them to freeze all her cards.

That was done.

“They checked the last transactions on my account to find my Revolut account had tried to take €500, €500 and €100 from my AIB account a while earlier. I told AIB that I had not authorised any of these transfers and they put a block on them.”

She realised how lucky she was three days after the original scam when she visited her local AIB with her husband “to double check everything was in order. We then found out that the scammer had managed to move €5,000 from our joint account to my account, I presume to move it into my Revolut account at a later stage but hadn’t managed to move that successfully.

“The €1,200 from my three vaults was used to purchase some goods from a clothing company in India,” she continues.

“The following morning I was bag-packing for a school in Dunnes Stores and the hacker rang me again and said: ‘Hi, it’s Josh here from yesterday, I just want to refund you that money from Amazon.’ I nearly died and told him I had reported him to the guards and hung up. He rang back twice more but I ignored his third call. The absolute cheek of him to ring me the day after he had stolen almost €1,200 from me. I am visibly shaken since my trauma. It feels like such a violation of myself and of course the money that I saved hard for 40 weeks.

I really feel I should not have to pay this money back as my account was taken over by a hacker who gained access to my account and took the money

—  Clodagh

Clodagh thought was the end of the story.

It wasn’t. AIB contacted her five weeks later – not long before Christmas, as it happens – to say Revolut had been looking for the €1,100 that had been “requested” by me on October 13th. I sent back to AIB a detailed account of the scam that day and implored them not to pay Revolut the €1,100 and to keep fighting my appeal. That was 18 weeks ago and I haven’t heard back from AIB bank yet,” she writes.

“Now Revolut are sending me emails a few times a week saying I am in a negative position on my account and that I need to add money to my account as soon as possible or else they will make arrangements to instruct a debt-collection agency to contact me and if they have to do this they might charge me for doing so. They keep saying I agreed to their terms and conditions when I set up my Revolut account in 2022. Legally where do I stand? Should I engage with Revolut and tell them I have no money and I can only pay them back €10 a week? I really feel I should not have to pay this money back as my account was taken over by a hacker who gained access to my account and took the money. I am afraid to answer the door every time my doorbell rings. Please help.”

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We did our best. We contacted Revolut and received a statement. However, we don’t think it will provide any comfort to Clodagh or to any victim of this type of crime.

“We are very sorry to hear about [Clodagh’s] case, or any instance where our customers are targeted by ruthless and highly sophisticated criminals,” it began.

“Revolut works hard and invests heavily to protect and support customers. We take a data-driven approach to identify scam activity and use sophisticated fraud modelling for both inbound and outbound transactions to protect Revolut customers from falling victim to fraud, including clear, unskippable warnings and direct interventions by our specialist fraud-prevention teams.”

The statement goes on to say that Revolut “identified suspicious transactions, and paused various transactions that [Clodagh] attempted to make, questioning in app the purpose of these transactions and providing the customer with extensive and targeted scam-specific warnings. Unfortunately, Revolut’s extensive interventions were not heeded and we subsequently processed the transactions in line with our customer’s instructions and our legal obligations.

“Revolut is deeply concerned that large numbers of frauds are being enabled across the industry by criminals using fake and spoofed phone calls. Revolut will never phone you about your account security without first confirming via our secure in-app chat. If customers are in doubt, we encourage them to reach out to us via in-app chat for support.”

We did express surprise that Revolut was so vigorously pursuing her over the top-ups that the criminals tried to send from her AIB account to her Revolut account . After she contacted AIB it put a block on those top-ups and instigated a chargeback process which saw the money taken from Clodagh’s Revolut account and returned to her AIB account. The company said it has “contacted the customer to account for the negative Revolut balance”.