Below is a story about how a customer is treated by Vodafone and Revolut. It appeared in The Irish Times yesterday and written by Conor Pope.
But before The Irish Times
It is becoming a daily battle between the individual and large corporations.
Lidl is introducing self-service tills in its stores. This appears on my self-service till yesterday.
Anyone any idea what it means? And then the misspelling. It’s a small detail, nevertheless it’s another example of the daily battle people have with modern technology.
Conor Pope
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,” he 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 and her Revolut account was remotely accessed and €1,850 sent to a sterling account in the UK.
“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. 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-thanexpected 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: “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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