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Unknown has taken last Sunday in the account of the financial service provider Revolut of Thomas Müller (name changed). Within minutes, the newspaper withdrew a total of CHF 30,000 from its UBS account. Now it turns out that this was not an isolated case. Other customers report having lost large sums on their revolution account. In front of this newspaper, eight people described their case and documented account transactions and chat stories with Revolut employees.
Six of them claim to have fallen due to a phishing attack. The other two deny it. Phishing was done via SMS. "With me, the scammers have had devilishly good timing," says an affected person. Only a few hours after changing the SIM card in his smartphone, he received an SMS, with Revolut requesting an account verification. He clicked on the link, confirmed his six-digit password and thought this was a common procedure when changing the SIM card. But instead he allowed unknown scammers to access his revolute account.
Charge without notice
Silently, the authors ransacked their report Saturday afternoon. As with the other victims, the Revolut app did not provide any notifications, as usual in transactions. 6,000 euros – the customer used Revolut as a foreign currency account – and 2,000 francs were changed into her Romanian and transferred to another Revolut user. Revolut found irregularities and closed the account. To date, the customer does not yet have access.
Apparently, a phishing wave reached Swiss Revolut customers last weekend. Most sufferers report that their account was hacked on Saturday. In most cases, the euro and the Swiss franc were converted into British pounds and then transferred to another Revolut account, where the track was lost to the information available so far. If the account was deposited on the credit card of a Swiss bank, thousands of francs were transferred from there to the Revolut account, where it was changed before the next transfer in foreign currency. In these cases, customers received a notification from their home bank via cell phone for the benefit of Revolut.
The system does not detect fraud
But why in these cases the security system of the internal bank has failed? This should recognize unusual payments, such as the charge of 30,000 francs, from Muller's UBS account and automatically block them. the UBS does not comment on the specific case. In principle, however, it notes that the system automatically determines the probability of fraud by a variety of factors. With regular transactions with the same operator, the probability of statistical fraud decreases and the system is less sensitive. Probably, in this case the system failed, as Müller regularly transferred money via the credit card to UBS to his revolute account.
There should be many other victims. Because Revolut has highlighted in his app now the warning that the company never asks for a personal PIN with an SMS. Revolut confirms on request that customers have lost money, but the company does not mention concrete data: "Our security systems have detected irregular activities on a limited number of revolute accounts after some customers have unknowingly responded to a phishing scam", the company source said in a statement.
"For me, scammers have had devilishly good timing."An affected person
There are other providers like Revolut, which offer their financial services, in particular via smartphone. But Revolut is probably the most popular in the world. There are over 4 million users worldwide, with thousands added every day. In Switzerland, the number of 110,000 account holders in this country has recently been circulated. Like other smartphone banks, Revolut offers payments – especially in foreign currencies – too often much more favorable conditions than traditional banks.
Those affected are insecure and complain in unison about being left in the dark by Revolut. Many of them were able to contact information providers only through a chat, but normally they could not do much more than refer to ongoing investigations. But last night, the financial services provider confirmed the following in this newspaper: "We will reimburse all customers lost as quickly as possible to all customers who have become victims of this ingenious fraud".
Created: 23.08.2019, 06:56 clock
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