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Analyzed from 2838 words in the discussion.
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#data#email#revolut#bank#government#requests#fintech#agency#those#banks
Discussion Sentiment
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Discussion (117 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Since Im months away from my next trip I didnt immediately cancel the card and just left it on out of curiosity. I started blocking every attempted merchant. At some point, I started getting Netflix subscription attempts, and when I tried to block it, it said "We can't block payments to Netflix. If you have a subscription with them, you can cancel it directly." Makes me wonder what kind of rube goldberg machine their backend runs on.
It's very common for neobanks to have a high rates of fraud, but also lower negotiating leverage with merchants because they're not chase, Wells, etc.
So a specific arrangement with a specific merchant seems within the realm of normal to me.
(The way I know it: Local court or police officer shows up at our office later that day and hands over a printout matching the request that we had been unable to confirm, on request of federal authority, in turn on request of the authority demanding we hand over some customers data. Those two requests utilizing government agency-internal auth mechanisms we do not need to know or care about.)
Most likely:
> and the whole thing was PDFs from .gov-ish email addresses
But I guess this moves the liability for answering fake requests to the local branch.
Way to difficult for Revolut, evidently.
> A Revolut spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that a “limited” number of customers were impacted and said the company had contacted those customers directly. Revolut, however, did not disclose the exact number of impacted individuals. It also did not answer whether the incident was limited to a specific market and declined to disclose the government agency involved.
Is the lack of transparency here about protecting the doxxed HNWIs or are they just trying to hide the incompetence?
in 2018 they turned off basic money laundering detection
in 2019 they used job applicants as free labour to get people to sign up.
in 2023 they didn't freeze accounts they were supposed to when asked by the NCA (the uk's equivalent of the FBI, kinda)
again in 2024 they came bottom in the league table for reported fraud(action fraud). They had 10k reports, ahead of barclays, which at the time had a much large amount of active users.
Again in 2024, they also had the highest push payment fraud reports. now, this _could_ be bad controls, user incompetence, or data leak. it could be argued that they were part of the reason for the rule changes, meaning that banks are now 50/50 liable for this kind of fraud.
Either way, they have a history of being shady/incompetent/bastards. They've also only been a fully licensed bank for ~6 months.
My speculative mental model so far was: They fired the dept which was handling those "emails" and did let some agents handle it. Which backfired and seems to fit that history you presented.
Of course it might hurt legit users by making other banks treat Revolut as suspicious but im not sure if thats enough to outweigh the positive. Data breaches and cancelation fees, on the other hand...
You do understand what push fraud is right? One person lost ~ÂŁ160k, a large chunk of it waiting for a human to answer.
also, its not like there aren't alternatives.
They had an EU license in Lithuania for years.
And they clearly figured that was easier than going through the UK where they had previously been licensed
Note: This is now 5+ years ago so things have probably changed since then.
I am not surprised at all that fake requests receive real responses, happens probably way more than anyone thinks.
That's a dangerous kind of threat to be making, and to act upon. for information that should remain private let alone owned by the bank itself.
It’s a modern fintech that’s most likely to be vulnerable. Banks tend to have a long history (either themselves or with the infrastructure they buy) of security, from physical to electronic. It’s what makes them often so clunky…there’s little incentive to streamline too much, and their insurance providers are reluctant to insure anything excitingly new.
Hell, banking is so conservative that their language is frozen in 14th century Italian from when banks were personally owned by rich families: the words “debit” (“give”) and “credit” (“take”) are from the bank owner’s perspective, not the customers’. But you tend not to see the kinds of breaches you see in modern fintech.
But, you know, move fast and break things, right?
Oh.. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia/deepfake-cfo-scam-ho...
And they are "FinTech". "Oh, that email looks legit, let's just hand out the data.", like they have never witnessed phishing from the old days... am curious about the story here. That PR-spokesperson is more than damaging...
That's "legacy old bank stuff they will disrupt along all the regulations".
"Your personal data must be held until it is permissible to erase it in accordance with the law. Rest assured, it is totally secure and only held for this purpose."
This was in the same conversation where I sent them the article.
> Hi, me affected by your breach?
Them:
> "I have checked our records and can confirm that you have not received any notifications or communications regarding any security incidents or data breaches in the past 30 days.
> We take your privacy extremely seriously. All data transmissions between our mobile apps, servers, and third parties are fully encrypted, and your personal information is stored in secure data centres with restricted access. If there is ever any security incident that impacts your account, we will always contact you directly with instructions.
> Are you asking because you recently received a suspicious email, text message, or noticed an unusual transaction on your account? Let me know, and we can investigate that together."
... bot stuffs.
Why do they even keep those?
Good thing there's, at least EU wide, EUDI (EU Digital Identity Wallet) around the corner which legally allows using cryptographic proofs instead of just storing as much data as possible of the user.
This addresses exactly this issue of having to disclose this amount of information solely as proof.
What you're referring to is that a bank does not require to tell you whether your account is going through specific checks (anti laundering and such).
However, if the email relied solely on SPF, the situation is less clear. An attacker could potentially spoof SPF by compromising any service on a server sharing the same public IP address via NAT.
One spoofs an email domain and then is able to get trust from a "modern global fintech"? Absolutely ridiculous. Having worked for several global scale tech companies, I've seen first hand how security is at the absolutely bottom of the list. It does not translate to $$$ so it is uncared for.
Revolut keeps pestering me with requests for interviews and I keep running away from it. One more con (pun intended) to the list.
Most requests are digitally signed PDFs that come via email, require a response sent to another email.
Revolut are known to be a bit shady but in this case they're damned if they do and damned if they don't
Cybersecurity 101: Call back the bank at the official number and all that yada yada.