Revolut confirms customer data breach through fake government requests

I had an interesting experience with my Revolut card. I only top it up when traveling, and the rest of the time it sits nearly empty, with like $3-4. At some point I started getting occasional notifications about transactions declining. Stuff like video game points and random little online shops. Clearly my card's been skimmed or otherwise leaked somehow. Bummer.

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.

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?

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.

This is a reminder about what happens to people happily uploading their passport and selfies into the app. Do not do it if you do not want to end up in a Russian underground forums.

Storing identification data (like a scanned passport) is not necessary. The question is “did you check the customer identity?” And if the answer is Yes, then you can mark it as such. You don’t need to store these scans at all.

I lost access to my Revolut account a while back and recovery did not work after losing access to my primary email address and MFA. They also removed the ability to deposit checks on their mobile app. For these reasons I can not treat it like a real bank anymore as much as I love their 4% APY savings account rate. Unlike gmail, which had recovery options with a secondary email address. They could have implemented something similar.

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?

> The data may have also included verification selfies

Why do they even keep those?

Are there any banks that are good at security? Obviously none have any privacy.

I asked if my data was compromised, they said no, but how can I trust/verify this?

The funny thing about Revolut is, that they send you from the same "no-reply" address your payment receipts and a ton of spam. There is no link in the spam do stop it and no obvious scheme in the header which would allow to filter the spam from the relevant mails. Good luck recognizing this breach notification as an important one...

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.

If an email was authenticated with DKIM, you cannot really blame Revolut. The attacker would have had to compromise the government email server, making it the government's fault.

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.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674666

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.

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