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A Revolut user encounters ‘evasive' customer service after €1,850 fraud

A Revolut user encounters ‘evasive' customer service after €1,850 fraud

Irish Times3 days ago
On May 22nd a reader's mother, a woman in her 70s, contacted
Vodafone
Ireland to report poor wifi and was promised a call back from a technician.
The following day the call she was expecting came – or so she thought – but what happened next has left her traumatised and substantially poorer.
The caller referenced the wifi issue 'and said she was eligible for a refund,' her son writes. 'She was sent a text link and asked to click it to 'verify' the refund.'
She did as she was asked to do by the person claiming to be from Vodafone but after following the link and inputting some key details her banking app was compromised, her
Revolut
account remotely accessed and €1,850 sent to a sterling account in the UK.
READ MORE
'She immediately reported it to Revolut, Vodafone, and An Garda Síochána, submitting screenshots of all the suspicious activity, a signed statement and the full context of the scam,' her son writes.
He tells us that she was asked by Revolut 'to upload this same dossier five times [and] Revolut never called her, despite promising to'.
He describes Revolut's support system as 'opaque and evasive, consisting of scripted replies and AI loops, with no clear case management or human escalation'.
He says that when he asked 'a basic admin question – what documents are needed to file a fraud report in Ireland – they refused to answer, citing GDPR, even though I never asked about her account,' he says.
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'Sorry you lost the money': Couple loses thousands of euro of wedding savings in Revolut 'ordeal'
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He also says Vodafone has 'not yet explained how someone knew about the wifi complaint and used that to engineer the scam'.
Our reader points out that the funds 'were sent to another Revolut account, raising questions about their fraud controls and whether the funds were frozen.
'At this point, we just want honest answers and a fair process. My mum has done everything asked of her, but she's getting nowhere – and it feels like the system is built to exhaust people into giving up.'
He says that 'everything is handled by bots with repeated requests for the same info, vague timelines, and generic cut-and-paste responses. Even now, weeks later, she still hasn't received a proper update, and it's genuinely shaken her confidence in using digital banking at all. It's an insane system and the fact you can't talk to a human is ludicrous.'
He says that when Revolut wanted his business account, 'the office would receive regular phone calls and emails from reps looking for the business. How could they not provide the same support to existing clients? Has Revolut quietly built a wall between customers and accountability?'
There are two troubling strands to this scam.
Did the criminals know she had contacted Vodafone and were able to time their first contact with her to coincide with the exact time she was expecting a call from that company?
And why are the systems that Revolut have in place so opaque and why has it proved to be impossible for this family to speak to a human being or even get a sense that Revolut is addressing this issue with the seriousness that it deserves?
First we contacted Vodafone and shared the details of this scam with them. The company checked its systems and said that there was no evidence of a data breach on its side and a spokesman could not definitively say how it was that our reader – or at least their mother – would receive a call purporting to be from Vodafone less than 24 hours after she had contacted the company.
It could be simple coincidence. Scammers make many, many such calls everyday and they must sometimes get lucky.
We also contacted Revolut.
In a statement the company said it was sorry for this person's experience 'and any instance where our customers are targeted by ruthless and sophisticated criminals. Revolut takes fraud, and the industry-wide risk of customers being coerced by organised criminals, incredibly seriously. Each potential fraud case concerning a Revolut customer is carefully investigated and assessed independently of other cases.'
The statement stresses that it has 'a fervent focus on improving the customer experience at Revolut, and the protection of our customers' money is paramount to that. We provide customer support 24/7 in-app via chat because it is the most secure method to communicate with customers, and helps to ensure that they can be certain they are connected with a member of our team.
'Any reported fraud automatically triggers human intervention from our customer service team, ensuring a user's case is handled by skilled live agents with expertise in financial crime.'
It said that in recent months it had introduced in-app calls 'to give users a secure way to engage with our customer service team over the phone and help them to expose phone call scams.'
Revolut said that last year it had prevented more than €700 million in potential fraud against customers by implementing in-app calls, real-time AI fraud-detection systems, transaction limits, in-app warnings and delayed payments for suspicious transactions, biometric authentication requirements, and providing educational resources to help consumers remain informed about potential risks.
'Revolut's financial crime prevention team now represents almost a third of our global workforce and, alongside many other payments firms, we deploy a number of different interventions that are solely designed to 'break the spell' of scammers and fraudsters,' it said.
'Whilst Revolut is unable to comment on the specifics of these interventions, so as to not provide any insight that could help ruthless criminals socially engineer their victims and bypass these, we are constantly innovating and testing a range of eye-catching warnings.
'While we are fully determined to protect our customers as best we can through our fraud prevention technologies, and go to every length to ensure scams are avoided, there is no denying that fraud is an industry-wide issue that needs to be tackled at source, particularly by the telecoms companies and social media apps that are enabling this. Banks and financial institutions should be the last line of defence, not the only line of defence.'
The story does have a happier-than-expected outcome. Initially the company wrote to her and outlined its processes and the steps it had taken to prevent any suspicious transactions taking place before determining that it was not at fault and as such no money would be refunded.
A day later we heard back from our reader again. 'You won't believe this. We went from that email yesterday to my mother getting her cash paid back today.'
In a letter the company sent to her a representative said that 'upon further investigation of your case, we have identified a mistake in how it was previously handled. Subsequently, we have reclassified the situation as an account-takeover fraud and organised a full reimbursement of €1891.50 along with €150 as a compensation for the stress caused by the whole situation. The payment was sent directly to your Revolut account.'
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Letters to the Editor, July 10th: On smaller apartments, the cost of crying and blackberries
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Letters to the Editor, July 10th: On smaller apartments, the cost of crying and blackberries

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Irish Times

time5 hours ago

  • Irish Times

Vacant property in central Dublin

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NORAID: Irish America and the IRA review: Few are as committed to the spilling of blood in Ireland as those who never set foot here
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NORAID: Irish America and the IRA review: Few are as committed to the spilling of blood in Ireland as those who never set foot here

The makers of NORAID: Irish America and the IRA , RTÉ 's flashy new two-part documentary about the Provisionals' support base in North America, say they want to 'tell a story that is misunderstood or not known at all'. But of course, anyone who was alive during the Troubles will remember only too well how elements within Irish America helped fund the IRA's campaign and, in so doing, contributed to the bombings of civilians, the kneecappings, the murder of Gardaí and the sectarian campaign against Protestant farmers along the border. How shocking to think this part of history might be in danger of slipping between the cracks of popular recollection. The film (RTÉ One. 9.35pm) doesn't quite paint Noraid – a contraction of 'Irish Northern Aid Committee' – as misunderstood heroes. However, it might have gone further in making explicit what they were supporting. That is, the slaughter of pensioners on Remembrance Sunday, the kidnapping and murder of businessmen, industrial-scale bank robbery. That isn't to absolve the British state of its sins in the North , its backing of loyalist death squads or the stain of colonialism, as dark as not-quite-dried blood. But the documentary does not convey, or even really acknowledge, the horror the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland felt at the time towards the Provos. And that is relevant to the story, as it also explains the widespread revulsion towards Noraid. If anything, the first of two episodes leans ever so subtly towards the Che Guevara version of history – never mind the body count; look at the cool poster we got out of it. READ MORE Hipster touches abound as the producers play up the New York element of the story. The Beastie Boys feature on the soundtrack, and the title cards are modelled on old cop shows. These are flourishes that do not always sit well with the grim subject matter. Still, there are flashes of humour, too – such as when activists recall arranging for senior members of the republican movement in Belfast to be interviewed by one of America's most widely-read journals, Playboy. Meanwhile, taxi driver John McDonagh remembers booking an ad in Times Square supporting the IRA – it finished with the initials 'UTP'. This spelt 'Up the Provos', though the company that took the booking thought it meant 'Up the Pope'. 'They never asked me what type of charity,' McDonagh says. 'I said I wanted to send season's greetings to the Irish people. They never asked what type of Irish people. I didn't offer what type.' If the film doesn't take a strong enough stand on the Provos, it does give a voice to senior Noraid figures and allows them to communicate their views uncritically. It introduces Martin Galvin, a lawyer and leading figure in Noraid. He was banned from entering Northern Ireland but went anyway in 1984. In the riot that followed his appearance at a rally in West Belfast, British security forces shot dead a protester with a rubber bullet. Galvin obviously wasn't to blame for the bloody excesses of the British security establishment. However, the violence would not have broken out had he not been there. 'We support Irish freedom ... the only way the British are going to leave Ireland is for the fight to be successful,' Galvin says – seemingly cleaving to the old republican shibboleth as seeing the British as an entirely external force and ignoring the inconvenient presence of a million unionists. Still, it is revealing to learn that Galvin and other Noraid members are far removed from the misty-eyed Irish-American stereotype. Noraid was largely based in New York, and its members have the hard-bitten qualities of characters from a Scorsese movie. That said, modern Sinn Féin's hipster-Marxist axis won't be thrilled to learn that Noraid expunged any hint of socialism from imported copies of An Phoblacht because that sort of thing would not have gone down well with Irish Americans. Nor do the producers address the uncomfortable fact that Irish America – so keen on the physical force of republicanism – would go on to become a power base for Donald Trump and, thus of 21st century Neo-Fascist. Interviewed today, Galvin is unapologetic and still retains some of the firebrand qualities that are a feature of his archive appearances. The documentary is also careful to point out that while Noraid organised fundraisers for Sinn Féin, it never supplied arms to the Provos. The task of smuggling guns across the Atlantic fell to organised criminals. That story will be told in part two and will touch on the role of Whitey Bulger (as later played on screen by Johnny Depp). But part one provides a fascinating portrait of a crucial element of the struggles – of true believers from across the sea who seemed to fancy themselves more Irish than those in the 26 counties who didn't much care about the Constitutional status of the North, only that people stopped dying. 'What I've found is the diaspora make a serious attempt to understand the Irish culture, whereas a lot of people that are actually from the island of Ireland have never made an attempt to understand the diaspora culture,' says Chris Byrne, a former New York cop and republican sympathiser. It is a reminder few are as committed to the spilling of blood in Ireland as those who never set foot here.

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