Fraud prevention by Revolut or any other provider is extremely hard. Too loose and people get scammed, too tight and you block people from making legitimate transactions. I used Uber Eats recently when on holiday using Revolut via Apple Pay and Revolut instantly blocked the payment as this is obviously a common fraud technique. With Revolut you can authorise pretty much instantly and move on at least.
I think these kinds of scams are more likely with Revolut as every second adult in Ireland has a Revolut account and people are just more likely to be younger and vulnerable to this type of scam. My grandmother isn't going to fall prey as she doesn't have a mobile phone and for payments she has no more than an ATM card and cheque book.
I digress a little but EU legislation called PSD2 came into force a few years ago which put obligations on industry called "strong customer authentication" that makes it very hard to do an old-fashioned hack using someone's online banking details. Fraudsters have adapted and scams are now much more sophisticated and basically trick people into providing all their details and then actually willingly sending the fraudster the money. It's called
authorised push payment fraud because it's
authorised by the consumer. They are not waking up in the morning to find their account drained of funds, they are actively doing it themselves. It's impossible to design a system that can be safely used by everyone, no matter how naive and gullible.
And I've gone on a bit too long but this part of Conor Pope's article really took the biscuit:
Last week The Irish Times contacted the Central Bank, the Department of Finance, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland (BPFI) and the banks to find out what they were doing about the curse of fraud and whether or not they might embrace – or enforce – a mandatory reimbursement scheme.
Suppose there was a spate of burglaries in Conor's neighbourhood and he writes an article on it. Imagine he looked for comment from lockmakers, window-fitters, and alarm manufacturers but didn't look for comment from the police force: An Garda Siochána.
Seriously folks, financial crime is, well,
crime, and it has to be tackled in many ways but chief among them should be law enforcement! I have some professional familiarity with this stuff and from what I can tell AGS and indeed other agencies (Europol, Interpol) are light years behind industry and supervisors on this stuff. All financial crime leaves digital traces which can be tracked and used for prosecution. It's very labour-intensive, needs a lot of IT skills and co-ordination with abroad due to the transnational nature of fraud these days. But from what I can tell this is just not a priority in Phoenix Park HQ.