Not upheld: scam / fraud - failure to prevent unauthorized payments and provide adequate warnings complaint against Revolut Ltd

Decision detail

Summary

Mr S complained that Revolut failed to protect him from a cryptocurrency investment scam, resulting in significant financial losses. Mr S made 15 cryptocurrency exchanges over three months, sending funds to what he believed was a legitimate investment opportunity. Revolut provided various warnings and interventions during the transaction process, but Mr S provided inaccurate information to proceed with the payments. The ombudsman found that while Revolut should have issued a tailored warning at the eleventh exchange, the complaint was not upheld because Mr S's deliberate provision of false information and trust in the scammers meant that even proportionate intervention would not have prevented the loss. The ombudsman concluded it would not be fair to hold Revolut liable for losses that could not have been prevented through reasonable intervention.

The Ombudsman's reasoning

While the ombudsman agreed that Revolut should have provided a tailored warning about crypto investment scams at the eleventh exchange, the key issue was causation. The ombudsman found that even if Revolut had intervened proportionately, it would not have prevented the loss because: (1) Mr S was deliberately providing inaccurate information to get transactions processed; (2) Mr S trusted the scammers' representations about the investment opportunity; (3) the transaction values and three-month timeframe did not indicate a pattern of fraud requiring human intervention; (4) Revolut's previous interventions on other transactions showed Mr S would likely have ignored warnings; and (5) cryptocurrency transactions cannot be reversed, so recovery was impossible regardless. The ombudsman concluded that while Revolut had obligations to protect customers from fraud, the harm was not reasonably foreseeable given the information available to Revolut at the time.

How this compares

Source

Read the original decision on the Financial Ombudsman Service website