Ran an LE request desk for a while and the whole thing was PDFs from .gov-ish email addresses. Only real control we had was calling the agency back on a number we looked up ourselves, not the one on the letterhead.
How can this happen to a modern fintech... Esp. handling identity verification so poorly?
> 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?
Revolut has a history of being both halfarsed and shady
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.
I've processed government requests at a FinTech before. Some are pretty good and there are bespoke channels for them so that you can be sure their genuine. Other are literally random emails you get that you are required to reply to, many of them demanding information to be sent in the clear. We always declined to reply to those even though we legally had to, we offered them to set up PGP if they wanted the data via email, or we offered other secure mechanisms for them. Most of these (who I know were from real agencies) stopped asking for the data once we stood firm that we could only deliver it over an encrypted channel.
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.
You could argue that the government agency is at fault. 1 for their breach, 2 more importantly: for mandating that personal information get handed over without an official court order which would have involved a far more stringent process with multiple parties involved.
My understanding of the situation is that no government agency actually requested data at all, just that someone impersonated a government email address and this was enough for Revolut to reply with the requested data.
From the PR statement, it's unclear if a gov. agency was hacked or it was a phishing attempt, from my point of view. Both cases are still not enough, even for a greasy spoon.
This can happen with modern fintech because of greed. There's a reason they can offer such cheap services. The customer takes a risk in return. Now that risk has materialized.
I see your point about greed. Thanks. Let me still contrast that: GPT6 has 99.9 in ARC-AGI 3 and multiple bug-bounty programs closed due to the sheer amount of automated attacks and reports.
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...
Here is one of the replies I got during my conversation with their agent (unsure if human or automated):
"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.
> "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."
In the USA they already take passport photos. Being able to receive mail addressed to a name is the closest thing to a national ID the USA has. They're already depended on for identity verification quite a lot.
At the end of the day, a government request for private, sensitive information is ultimately a form of a backdoor, and there is no such thing as a backdoor only the good guys can use.
The interesting failure here is not phishing, it is that "the email came from the real government domain" was accepted as authorization. A domain proves who sent the message, not that the sender was entitled to ask. Every compliance team I have worked with in payments had the same gap: the legal-request inbox verifies DKIM and the letterhead, then a human decides under time pressure with "law enforcement" in the subject line. What actually works is boring: a published list of the exact channels each authority uses, a callback to a number you looked up yourself rather than one in the email, a required case reference you can verify with the agency, and a hard rule that emergency requests get a minimal data set, never full KYC packages plus transaction history. The part that should worry Revolut customers more than the passport scans is the Bitcoin history: on-chain that data is permanent, so a leaked address-to-identity mapping does not expire.
I was thinking about exactly that and then I found this comment.
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.
In the countries you are licensed in you are legally required to reply to law enforcement requests. In most places there is no official channel for this. It is literally stuff like LE@Fintech.com. Emails come from all over and random domains that appear official-ish. Most official domains do not have DKIM or SPIF setup, very easy to spoof. LE by and large do not take security seriously, they do not take data transfer seriously.
Most requests are digitally signed PDFs that come via email, require a response sent to another email.
Ran an LE request desk for a while and the whole thing was PDFs from .gov-ish email addresses. Only real control we had was calling the agency back on a number we looked up ourselves, not the one on the letterhead.
You say .gov-ish, does this mean compromised gov email accounts, spoofed email addresses or domains that look like government domains?
.gov is a US thing, and not even all US agencies use .gov ending emails.
I've done that as well and this is what most of those do look like.
What is LE? Let’s Encrypt?
Guessing Law Enforcement
Law enforcement.
How can this happen to a modern fintech... Esp. handling identity verification so poorly?
> 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?
Revolut has a history of being both halfarsed and shady
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.
I've processed government requests at a FinTech before. Some are pretty good and there are bespoke channels for them so that you can be sure their genuine. Other are literally random emails you get that you are required to reply to, many of them demanding information to be sent in the clear. We always declined to reply to those even though we legally had to, we offered them to set up PGP if they wanted the data via email, or we offered other secure mechanisms for them. Most of these (who I know were from real agencies) stopped asking for the data once we stood firm that we could only deliver it over an encrypted channel.
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.
You could argue that the government agency is at fault. 1 for their breach, 2 more importantly: for mandating that personal information get handed over without an official court order which would have involved a far more stringent process with multiple parties involved.
My understanding of the situation is that no government agency actually requested data at all, just that someone impersonated a government email address and this was enough for Revolut to reply with the requested data.
From the PR statement, it's unclear if a gov. agency was hacked or it was a phishing attempt, from my point of view. Both cases are still not enough, even for a greasy spoon.
It was probably an AI agent that handed it over.
This can happen with modern fintech because of greed. There's a reason they can offer such cheap services. The customer takes a risk in return. Now that risk has materialized.
Yes, because it's _only_ "modern fintech" that are susceptible to social engineering, right?
Oh.. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia/deepfake-cfo-scam-ho...
I see your point about greed. Thanks. Let me still contrast that: GPT6 has 99.9 in ARC-AGI 3 and multiple bug-bounty programs closed due to the sheer amount of automated attacks and reports.
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...
Here is one of the replies I got during my conversation with their agent (unsure if human or automated):
"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.
Was it the same agent that released the data?
My dialogue:
> 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.
> The data may have also included verification selfies
Why do they even keep those?
I am almost sure they don't and instead they query selfies and documents on-demand from their KYC provider.
Yep, the KYC provider keeps them.
Around banking it's usually because they have to
Other banks do not require selfies, so there are other options
But they are verifying customers in person with account creation, this is an online bank
> But they are verifying customers in person with account creation, this is an online bank
Revolut could do the same as they do with ATMs: make a partnership with local banks for the verification step.
Seems like a thing you should be able to do at the post office.
What does post office have to do with identity verification?
In the USA they already take passport photos. Being able to receive mail addressed to a name is the closest thing to a national ID the USA has. They're already depended on for identity verification quite a lot.
This is a 100% online bank account you typically open from an app. The typical clientele will just use the "selfie" auth.
The issue is that there is no alternative to the "selfie" auth in case of Revolut.
Most banks now require selfies, try shopping around. KYC requirements get tightened all the time.
I have accounts with 2 other banks. They never asked for a selfie.
CYA in case of litigation.
Even if the trigger was spoofed, how come there is no secure channel that the govt provides to receive the data? Was this one also compromised?
I asked if my data was compromised, they said no, but how can I trust/verify this?
You can't, really. Banking legislation does not require them to tell you.
At the end of the day, a government request for private, sensitive information is ultimately a form of a backdoor, and there is no such thing as a backdoor only the good guys can use.
The interesting failure here is not phishing, it is that "the email came from the real government domain" was accepted as authorization. A domain proves who sent the message, not that the sender was entitled to ask. Every compliance team I have worked with in payments had the same gap: the legal-request inbox verifies DKIM and the letterhead, then a human decides under time pressure with "law enforcement" in the subject line. What actually works is boring: a published list of the exact channels each authority uses, a callback to a number you looked up yourself rather than one in the email, a required case reference you can verify with the agency, and a hard rule that emergency requests get a minimal data set, never full KYC packages plus transaction history. The part that should worry Revolut customers more than the passport scans is the Bitcoin history: on-chain that data is permanent, so a leaked address-to-identity mapping does not expire.
I was thinking about exactly that and then I found this comment.
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.
In the countries you are licensed in you are legally required to reply to law enforcement requests. In most places there is no official channel for this. It is literally stuff like LE@Fintech.com. Emails come from all over and random domains that appear official-ish. Most official domains do not have DKIM or SPIF setup, very easy to spoof. LE by and large do not take security seriously, they do not take data transfer seriously.
Most requests are digitally signed PDFs that come via email, require a response sent to another email.
They also pay peanuts, and the culture is toxic.