Scam warning over Revolut payments app after man loses $5k for his mom’s new wheelchair | #ukscams | #datingscams | #european

• Jim Heptinstall, 44, chose Revolut as a cheaper way to send money abroad, but says his transactions were intercepted by hackers
• Company agreed to reimburse him only after being contacted by DailyMail.com 
• READ MORE: Why has Revolut been hit by a surge in scams? 

A New York resident has warned Americans of a scam risk after he lost almost $5,000 that he was trying to send to his ailing mother using a payments app.

Jim Heptinstall set up an account with Revolut, which bills itself as a borderless ‘digital banking alternative’ and offers a prepaid Visa card, money transfers and currency-exchange services.

When Jim’s UK-based mom needed a new wheelchair last year, he thought it would be the perfect way to transfer funds from the US without paying a costly fee.

But after transferring money into his account, he was horrified to discover a series of fraudulent payments totaling almost $5,000 had been made to Eastern European names he didn’t recognize without his knowledge.

After months of back and forth, the firm refused to refund Jim, 44, a penny. Revolut finally agreed to reimburse the New Yorker the $4,715 stolen from his account only after DailyMail.com intervened. 

Jim is not the first to complain about the firm’s handling of fraud claims – in the UK, where Revolut is headquartered, the company has been criticized by fraud victims who have not been issued refunds. 

Revolut allows users to open an account with just a phone number and no paperwork. And the company claims it partners with authorized vendors to retrieve users’ information such as social security numbers, addresses and emails.

Jim told DailyMail.com he first heard about Revolut from a friend who was visiting the US from England and used the neobank to transfer around $800 to him.

The consultant, who is originally from England, kept the money his friend sent him,  in his Revolut account, which he accessed through facial recognition on his iPhone. 

He mostly forgot about the app until he needed to send money to the UK for his 76-year-old mother, who has rheumatoid arthritis and needed a wheelchair.

But shortly after transferring three separate payments of $1,500 from his Chase bank account to his Revolt account, Jim checked the app and saw five batches of payments made between August 14, 2022, and September 24, 2022 that he says were fraudulent.

Records shared with DailyMail.com show 18 transactions totaling $4,715 to names such as Yana Melnychenko, Pavlo Petrukhin and Anatoliy Khugol.

‘The money was intercepted by a number of Eastern European names,’ Jim told DailyMail.com. ‘I’ve got the statement saying all these different strange names. I have no idea who these people are.’

Jim claims that when he tried to contact Revolut, he could only speak to agents through online chats and was directed to file a police report.

‘I wasn’t able to physically speak to anyone, it was all through chat rooms with different agents every time,’ he said. ‘They have no one to actually talk to on the phone. You can’t call anyone. It’s all through chats. It’s just appalling customer service. They didn’t give a s***.’

He then contacted his local police department, the NYPD, the Federal Trade Commission as well as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to make formal complaints.

However, the agencies eventually told him they had contacted Revolut and trusted the results of the company’s internal investigation, which claimed the transactions were legitimate and would not be refunded.

‘They talked to them and came back to me and said, you know, we’re happy with the investigation that they made,’ Jim said.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the NYPD and the three agencies for comment. 

According to Revolut’s website: ‘The funds that are on deposit in your card account are held by Metropolitan Commercial Bank and are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to $250,000.’

But months after the allegedly fraudulent transactions, Jim said he had been unable to get any sort of refund, and thought he would be forced to cough up extra money to assist his mom in England.

‘Revolut has millions of users – when it comes to the crimes they need to step up because Russian, or some sort of hackers are getting in and taking their clients’ money and they don’t really care,’ he added.

‘I would love to just get that money back and send it straight to my mom. Literally, that’s where it’s going to go.’

Finally, after being contacted by DailyMail.com, a spokesperson for Revolut said they had reviewed the case and would now be refunding Jim the $4,715 stolen from his account.

In a statement, the company said: ‘Revolut takes the protection and support of its customers extremely seriously and is fully aware of the industry-wide risk of customers being targeted by organized criminals. We are very sorry to hear about any instance where our customers are targeted by ruthless and highly sophisticated criminals.

‘Revolut would like to apologize to Mr Heptinstall over this case. The support and communication that he received fell below our usually high standards. As a gesture of goodwill we are covering the stolen funds in full.’

The neobank launched in the US in 2020, and now boats more than 700,000 US customers. Last year, it named Sid Jajodia as CEO of its US arm in an effort to advance its reach in North America. 

The company submitted a draft application with US regulators to obtain a banking license back in March 2022 but has yet to receive it.

While Revolut is still little known in the US, the company has been plagued by controversy across the pond as users claim to have fallen victim to various types of scams.

Mother-of-two Jenny Crooks claims she and her husband lost their live savings after a fraudster stole his card details, walked into Cartier in Selfridges, and spent £62,000 ($77,149).

The couple, who lives in England, said Revolut has been difficult to contact and tried to write them off with generic emails and denials. 

When she asked Revolut why they hadn’t received a notification and the payment hadn’t been blocked, an agent replied that because the transaction was made using Apple Pay, it hadn’t been through some security protocols. 

This month, the Bank of England told the Treasury that it was planning on rejecting Revolut’s application for a banking license after the company’s two-year campaign.

According to the Telegraph, the Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), responsible for licenses, told the Treasury in March that Revolut’s initial application would be turned down within weeks because of concerns over its balance sheet.

That would be a crushing blow for the company which has been trying since 2021 to win approval from regulators so it can expand its services in Britain into taking deposits and giving loans.

Founded in 2015, Revolut was once the UK’s tech darling, hailed as a ‘shining’ success by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. The neobank currently has 28 million customers across Europe, Asia and the US. 

Its founder and CEO, Nikolay Storonsky, created the platform to provide cheaper currency transfers and the fintech is backed by the Bank of Lithuania, which granted it a European banking license in 2018.

While the Crooks suffered a fraud known as card fraud, other common scams include Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams, where fraudsters trick people into sending money to accounts controlled by crooks.

In 2022, 900 complaints about APP scams were made to the UK’s Financial Ombudsman about Revolut, of which 594 were upheld.

This is nearly three times the number of complaints made in 2021 and more than five times the number Revolut received in 2020. However, their customer numbers have also increased rapidly over the same period.