Refundee recovered life savings lost in unauthorised scam

Our client was the victim of an unauthorised impersonation scam, where the scammers impersonated our client’s bank, Revolut.

The scammers called our client claiming their account is at risk and said their account may have been compromised and asked them if they had used any unsecured public wifi recently.

They were asked to provide details for security and to share a photo of themselves with their passport. The scammers told our client they needed to confirm what device they were on so they could block the ‘scammers’ device’ that had accessed their account and encouraged them to install AnyDesk to verify this.

Our client received texts from a spoofed number that showed up in the thread of messages they already had with Revolut, which tricked them into sharing a one-time passcode (OTP) with the scammers.

Money was being taken without their knowledge

Little to our client’s knowledge, the scammers were making transfers and payments to an account controlled by them, leaving the account drained.

Before our client could process what was happening, they had lost their life savings to an unauthorised scam.

When the client found us, they were obviously in a stressful state. We provided the support they needed to get through a difficult process.

We helped our client gather all the evidence they needed and provided a bespoke report to the bank, showing why our client should be reimbursed.

The bank initially rejected the complaint, which we then escalated to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). The FOS agreed that the bank was at fault, and our client was reimbursed £154,000.