Scam alert via Revolut payment app after man loses $5,000 for his mother’s new wheelchair

A New York resident has warned Americans about a scam after he lost nearly $5,000 he tried to send to his ailing mother via a payment app.

Jim Heptinstall has opened an account with Revolut, which bills itself as a borderless “alternative to digital banking” and offers a prepaid Visa card, money transfers and currency exchange services.

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

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

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

Jim isn’t the first to complain about the company’s handling of fraud claims – in the UK, where Revolut is headquartered, the company has been criticized by victims of fraud who have not received a refund.

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

Jim told DailyMail.com that he first heard about Revolut from a friend who visited the US from England and used the neobank to transfer about $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 had to send money to the UK for his 76-year-old mother, who has rheumatoid arthritis and needed a wheelchair.

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

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

“The money has been intercepted by some Eastern European names,” Jim told DailyMail.com. “I have the statement with all those different strange names. I have no idea who these people are.’

Jim claims that when he tried to contact Revolut, he was only able to talk to officers through online chats and was instructed to report the incident to the police.

“I couldn’t talk to anyone physically, it was all through chat rooms with different agents each time,” he said. “They don’t have anyone to really talk to on the phone. You can’t call anyone. It’s all through chats. It’s just terrible customer service. They didn’t care.’

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

However, the agencies eventually told him that they had contacted Revolut and trusted the results of the company’s internal investigation, which claimed that 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 research they’ve done,” said Jim.

DailyMail.com has contacted the NYPD and the three agencies for comment.

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

But months after the alleged fraudulent transactions, Jim said he had been unable to obtain any sort of refund and believed he would be forced to cough up extra money to help his mother in England.

“Revolut has millions of users – when it comes to the crimes they have to step up because Russians or some kind of hackers come in and steal their customers’ money and they don’t really care,” he added.

“I’d like to get that money back and send it directly to my mother. Literally, that’s where it’s going.’

Finally, after DailyMail.com contacted him, a Revolut spokesperson said they had looked into the matter and would now refund Jim the $4,715 stolen from his account.

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

“Revolut would like to apologize to Mr. Heptinstall for this matter. The support and communication he received was below our usually high standard. As a token of goodwill, we fully cover the stolen money.’

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

The company submitted a draft application to US regulators in March 2022 to obtain a banking license, but has not yet received it.

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

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

The couple, who live in England, said Revolut was hard to reach 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 with Apple Pay, some security protocols hadn’t been passed.

This month, the Bank of England told the Treasury it intended to reject Revolut’s application for a banking license following the company’s two-year campaign.

According to the Telegraph, the Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), responsible for licensing, told the Treasury in March that Revolut’s initial application would be rejected within weeks due to balance sheet concerns.

That would be a crushing blow to the company which has been trying since 2021 to gain regulatory approval so it can expand its services in Britain into taking deposits and lending.

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

The founder and CEO, Nikolay Storonsky, created the platform to offer 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 were victims of 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 scammers.

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

This is almost three times the number of complaints filed in 2021 and more than five times the number Revolut received in 2020. However, their number of customers has also increased rapidly over the same period.