Article from the BBC. The person scammed still made mistakes, but the banks processes weren’t really good enough.
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I have a Wise account and I ONLY use it to move money across different currencies. The money does not go to Wise until I am doing the transaction. I have two accounts with them - a £ a/c and a € a/c and they each have about £20 in them.
It is sheer folly to use these fintech companies as full-on bank accounts. They do not have the systems or levels of security that traditional banks do.
Mind you - the man was an idiot! I’ve just done a Wise transfer this morning which requires an SMS and the message says something like “this code allows you to get into your account. Do not share with anyone even a Wise member of staff.” I’m assuming Revolut will have a similar message.
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I can’t figure out how anyone clever enough to have £165,000 in cash through their business is daft enough to keep it in Revolut. While it’s concerning that no flags were raised in Revolut’s systems about unusual transactions, I feel this is pretty much on him for ignoring the most basic of good practice with security codes.
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I agree that the main person mentioned was foolish, but thought it worth highlighting here, knowing quite a few use Revolut.
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The BBC prog Panorama is doing a special report on Revolut tonight.
I use only Torfex and then only for direct pound/euro exchanges between my 2 banks. I never leave money in there and know that the euros arrive in my French account within an hour or so of the pounds leaving the English one.
Also, due to Yorkshire bank rules I can’t transfer more than £1,000 in one 24 hour period (£500 twice) which used to irritate me but I now realise it is a great protection because the speed of transfer means that if Torfex went bust or someone there disappeared over the horizon, that is the maximum I would lose.
Always worth highlighting these scams so that everyone is on their toes, but equally, it should be smacked home to everyone never to get caught up in a scam. Heaven knows there has been enough do’s and don’ts on the subject, yet people are continually sucked in.
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I do hope that it is not going to highlight “Jack, the international businessman”…? 
You’d hope, though it’s not totally clear that the text came from Revolut and not the scammers.
But surely that’s the whole point - the scammers were asking him to share information - banks tell you not to share, even if supposedly asked for by bank staff
One of the first mistakes was to trust the co-working space network as being secure. From the meagre description provided in the article, it doesn’t seem like it was. My experience of co-working spaces is that they are often not set up with security in mind - for example, allowing wifi access with a stupid, easy to guess, password that is never changed.
Yes, agree.
My point was that the text might have been from the scammers, in which case it would not have had the warnings which are increasingly included.
But the victim should have known that the only recipient of such a code would be a bank webpage wanting confirmation of their 2FA
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Only on the news in order to advertise the prgramme. Common ploy by BBC.
Every time I do any transfer between accounts involving a debit from a Revolut account, I am asked at every single stage to be sure that the transfer I am making is legitimate, and not fraudulent. This is about four times for every transaction. It even happens for transactions between my own other accounts where I have made transactions before. Frankly, if someone is going to ignore repeated warnings like this and not do due diligence then what more can be done to stop this ? What I would say, instead of the thread heading is ‘be extra careful if you make a transfer from any account’
Edit: I don’t actually keep much money in my Euro Revolut account for more than a few hours as I mainly use it for large yearly transfers from my pension.
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I just watched the programme and my opinion hasn’t really changed. The first victim installed remote control software on her computer and the second was “tricked into giving away enough information to recreate his account on another phone”.
Where Revolut were at fault was that they didn’t pick up a suspicious pattern of transactions and the process of contacting someone to report fraud is awful. There was also an issue with being able to fool the biometric ID with a photo, now fixed.
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So, could do better in protecting users from themselves, not a huge bag of risk? Still worth being extra careful, if you can’t be sure they have a safety net for you.
Thanks for posting the ‘review’.
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Likewise, do not share information about your finances in social media. There is info in this thread which could be very useful to scammers about how some of you manage your accounts… keep it generic and dont mention specific banks or dinance systems.
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