which — you know, we film abroad — so it was all of that, all the functions that are there were so useful for my business to be able to run a team. so i thought, actually, functionality—wise, revolut is a great banking app. in september last year, talia got a call from someone claiming to be from revolut. she was tricked into believing there was fraudulent activity on her account, and unwittingly approved payments to the scammers. she lost almost £25,000. we're a small business, you know? we had only started a year and a bit ago. you know, thankfully we could survive it, but it was really, really stressful all of a sudden not to have 25k. and one other thing that really struck me was strange — when i reported the crime to the police, to action fraud, they weren't at all surprised that i was banking with revolut. and the call handler says that they had so many calls from revolut customers.

last year, action fraud received almost 10,000 reports of fraud in which revolut was named — 2,000 more than the bank with the most uk customers, barclays, and double that of monzo, a similar—sized competitor. revolut is part of a new breed of digital—only financial institutions. they offer all their services online or through an app, and there are no branches to go to. in the uk, 20 million people put money into these types of accounts. and revolut is one of the most popular. it spent millions on marketing. i think revolut is probably one of the most ambitious companies on the planet. revolut was founded in 2015 by a guy called nikolay storonsky, who is an ex—lehman brothers trader and credit suisse trader who left to start a new kind of financial services company. amy lewin is the editor of sifted magazine. published by the financial times, it reports on europe's

tech scene. so i think nikolay thought that banking could be done much better, and much cheaper, and much more digitally. when revolut started, it began with a payment card that you could use to spend in several different currencies. and it very quickly expanded into many different products, including current accounts, insurance and crypto trading. revolut may have started small, but its founder was always dreaming big. when i was seven years old, my dream was to become an astronaut. nikolay storonsky sees revolut as a rocket ship, ready to launch and take on the world of traditional banking. injuly this year, after a three—year—long wait, the uk banking regulator finally granted revolut a provisional banking licence. that means revolut is on its way to becoming a fully fledged bank. but until it gets that full licence, revolut will continue to operate as an electronic

money institution — or e—money firm. revolut is known for its competitive foreign exchange rates, easy payment services, and cryptocurrency trading. when it gets its banking licence, it'll also be able to offer loans, mortgages and credit cards. revolut�*s been growing rapidly. it's amassed more than 45 million users worldwide — double the number it had in 2021 — and almost tripled its revenue to £1.8 billion in 2023. it's been bringing the tech industry mindset of moving fast and breaking things to the traditional world of banking. the problem with being . a disruptor, you can'tjust move fast and break things in banking, because you're| dealing with people's money, and putting people's money. at risk isn't acceptable. after a hard day at work, going and just getting rid of the day, thrashing out the miles — that's really good, really therapeutic.

this is laura. she lives in stamford in lincolnshire and loves running. a few years ago, she turned her passion into a business — a sportswear shop. laura thought revolut was the perfect fit for her hectic schedule. for a small company, i needed something that was quick and simple, and they seemed to have the best solution. for me at that time, being busy — and i had 20 other things that i had to do — within 30 minutes, i'd got an account with them, all opened up and ready to go. in that hour of my day, that was fabulous, it was really good. laura spoke to a business manager to finish setting up her account. so several months later, when she received another call, she didn't find it strange. i had done an ultra run on the sunday before, so i was pretty tired on that monday morning. i was in the office by myself. i got a call from somebody

saying that it was the fraud department at revolut. hi. good afternoon. am i speaking to laura bailey? the call was automatically recorded on laura's business line. this is the first time she's listened back to it. the caller tells laura he's from revolut — he's not — and that her account is under attack from a fraudster. that's not true either. let's go through the payment details with yourself now, the ones that were obviously flagged up. it was a transaction of £5,000 to a company with the name of binance. and i said no, i didn't recognise that name. and i was feeling a little bit disheartened because ijust thought, "i don't have time for all this. "enough already." he asked me to go onto the website and do some checks. i suppose the doubt started to creep in, and he relentlessly kept saying he was trying to help me, that i shouldn't be worried. the scammer reassures laura he's on top of the situation. yeah, obviously these scams can be quite convincing! i don't know whether it's irritating me or upsetting me.

it's, like, under my skin. it's horrible. mohammed bleep, does that ring bells? - do you know this person? no. he's wheeling out what appears to be a carefully prepared script, piling pressure on laura. next, the scammer convinces laura to download software which he says will securely connect her computer to revolut. in fact, she's handing over control of her computer to the scammer. within. . .seconds. .. ..my computer was flashing, my screens were flashing. i was like, "what are you doing?" i couldn't do anything on my computer at all. the scammer now has direct access to her bank account. he starts setting up a new payment, but tells laura it's the fraudster doing it. the fraudster tried to make a payment from your account into their account. right, 0k. so what they tried to do

is make a payment of £100. in order to complete the payment, the scammer now needs the six—digit security code that revolut is about to send to laura's phone. he's pretending that if she hands it over, he can stop the fraud. and all you have to do isjust confirm the code to me. instead, he uses it to authorise a payment of £100 to a new payee he controls. so i'vejust paid some "maria" person? no, no, not at all, ma'am. you're now worrying me. you haven't paid maria. maria's not getting paid by you. next thing, laura sees five further payments come out. the scammer drains her account. oh, you bleep. call ends now, this is the moment that many banks may intervene. a suspicious series of payments draining the account and made to someone who's not been paid before. all this should

raise alarm bells. terminal chimes banks and financial institutions are looking at, what does that behavioural data look like? nina kerkez is a fraud specialist at lexisnexis. its software is used by most of the biggest banks in the uk, collecting data on our spending behaviour. think about, like, little footsteps in the wet sands. terminal chimes i'm leaving different data points behind me and you, as a bank, are learning about me as a consumer. terminal chimes nina is talking about our digital banking presence. whether i'm on a computer or on my smartphone, every time i interact with my bank — shopping online, tapping my phone to pay for things — my bank is getting to know me. thank you. terminal chimes it knows the kind of devices i use and where i use them. and so financial institutions typically have the view of all of your behaviour... terminal chimes ..and all of your engagements with that bank. how do i transact? where is my money going to?

over time, the bank builds a picture of its customers and what we routinely spend our money on. and when an unusual transaction's made, computer software should trigger an alert. glitches and distortion so if somebody is suddenly processing a vast amount of transactions and processing a ton of payments to either a new account or account that they previously maybe had a few touch points with, it is something that is a red flag, and then banks should typically start to investigate some of that behaviour — call their customer, send them a text message, engage in some way with the customer to ensure that those transactions are in fact legitimate. fraud is, of course, a big problem for all banks, and no technology is completely scam—proof. and that's because the weakest link in the system is usually you 01’ me.

normally, when a scam is conducted, the principal reason is that the victim trusts the fraudster. and fraudsters sadly, are very, very good at creating trust. they create a sense of urgency and a sense of pressure. refundee is hired by victims of fraud when their banks have refused to give their money back. so revolut makes up a big portion of our casework. they make up about a quarter of the cases that we see, which is about twice as many as the next largest, which is barclays. banks declare how much their customers have lost to fraud. but because revolut�*s not yet a fully fledged bank, it doesn't publish the figures. there are some figures we do know — that's the amount of money that's been scammed from other bank customers that's ended up in revolut accounts. we hear from customers consistently that they're told to set up revolut accounts when they are becoming

the victim of a scam. it might be safe to draw the conclusion from that, that fraud victims are told to set up revolut accounts because fraudsters find it easier to move money through revolut than any other bank. when someone is tricked into transferring money to a fraudster, it's known as an authorised push payment — or app fraud. it's the most common type of scam in the uk. last year, for every million pounds paid into revolut accounts, £756 was from app fraud. that's more than ten times the amount for barclays and four times more than its similar—sized competitor, monzo. we wanted to find out more about what makes revolut tick and how it deals with fraud. we spoke to eight former employees from various

departments across the business to try and understand revolut�*s internal work culture. two things came up again and again — revolut�*s insatiable appetite for growth, and a high—pressure work environment that stifles dissent. two former senior insiders agreed to speak to us. both asked us to protect their identities for fear of damaging their careers, so actors are reading their words. it was a difficult culture at revolut. sink orswim. jump on the rocket ship, or get off. it's not for everybody. it felt the mission was growth. the culture was about protecting the brand and losses, no matter how small. they'd want to do things their own way. they're here to disrupt. the second insider provided a written account of their time at revolut.

in the world of finance, when new products are launched, protections against fraud are sometimes known as fences. we wanted to start with high fences, but we were told to bring those fences down before launch because we needed more growth. and if you resisted, you were moved off the project. the problem for all banks and e—money firms is that if you make your fences too high, it can put off potential customers. revolut says it has a high—performance culture, with an expectation to deliver good customer outcomes. it says it has robust controls to meet its legal and regulatory obligations,

and that all new product launches involve comprehensive risk assessment and governance approval processes. it also says it's invested heavily in its financial crime prevention team, which now makes up more than a third of its total global workforce. jack is another small—business owner, and a revolut customer. i have an international business and so i need to hold multiple different currencies. so revolut did seem like a good bank on paper, and they also advertised themselves as being a very safe bank that's a good place to store your money, and you're safe in doing that. in february this year, jack also got a call from someone pretending to be from revolut. phone rings so they told me there's been some unauthorised transactions on the account. i was at a coworking space,

and they had me believe that potentially the accounts — or, like, my device has been compromised by being on a shared wi—fi. so that did actually seem quite plausible. this scam was different, though. jack was persuaded to hand over enough information to allow the scammers to put jack's revolut account onto their device. this is where jack says revolut�*s technology failed to protect him. if an account is used on a new device, revolut asks for a selfie to check its really you. i never did that. i didn't send any photos. i had zero, nothing to do with that. jack says he asked revolut to show him the selfie that authorised the new device. they actually say that it wasn't stored in their system, and so there's no way of actually proving how it was done or what photo was used. we wanted to find out how a scammer could bypass revolut�*s selfie check. dr katie paxton—fear is a cybersecurity specialist at manchester metropolitan university.

nice to meet you. so, the selfie check is actually really, really important for a lot of revolut security. and that's because it's a key method that's used to verify the person. that includes, on opening new accounts, to verify that it's an actual human, not a bot opening accounts. we asked katie to look at what could have happened in jack's case. how straightforward is this? what are we looking at here? well, we can start by, you know, a simple google search here. these aren't necessarily, like, dark web. a lot of these are more what we might call the deep web. you have to know what you're looking for. katie finds tutorials online, complete with videos showing how the revolut selfie check can be defeated. would this work on any phone? yes. so this is the example in android. and here i've got another video. this is showing it happening on an iphone. we start following the tutorials, but we're not

revealing all the steps involved. a phone's camera can be made to believe that a still image taken from social media is actually you looking into the camera live. so, if we open up the photo app — or the camera app — we can actually see what's happening here. so as i turn on this, you can see the camera now thinks it's my face. as i switch on this one, it now thinks it's your face. the camera thinks that photo is live, going into the camera? yeah. that was very simple. it really was. scary, isn't it? that's scarily simple. when we try it out on the revolut app, it doesn't work. it looks like the company has fixed this vulnerability. i think, based on my testing of the revolut app now, it's certainly not a currently exploitable vulnerability. but i certainly believe that, in the past, when the victims are saying, you know, "this happened to me," i absolutely believe them. although we can't be certain if this is how the scammers managed to installjack�*s

revolut app, the timeline of the scam and the dates of the tutorials online match up. after the fraudsters took overjack�*s account, they could see all the payments he'd made that morning. so i get a text message that says, "confirm transfer, £21. 98 to etsy. " and that was the exact amount that was sent to etsy that morning. and so i was like, "yes, that was me." what jack didn't realise was the scammers had set up their own account, and called it "etsy". so instead of confirming the earlier payment to the real etsy, he was now authorising a payment to the scammers. so they do that again, for another etsy, and one called revolut fees. and so i'm basically allowing them to kind of add these payees. after authorising three payments to the fraudsters, the floodgates opened. money began to fly out. so, over about an hour, there's 137 payments that go through, out to these brand—new accounts. thousands of pounds drain

from jack's account. despite the number and speed of these transactions, revolut allows them to go through. at this point, jack wanted to call revolut and stop any more payments being made. but, unlike conventional banks, revolut doesn't have a dedicated number to report fraud. automated voice: just to let you know, this phone line - is completely automated - and here to help you do things like lock your card - or make a general inquiry. if you're looking to speak. to a human, then head over to our chat support within the app. - the only way you can message revolut is on their chat. you can't phone them. there's no other way of contacting them. even finding out how to start a chat with revolut isn't easy. it's buried deep within the app. you have to click through lots of pages. so i messaged them on the chat, saying, "i'm being scammed, please freeze my account." and they kind of passed me to someone else in a different department, then they asked me some questions. it takes 23 minutes for them

to freeze the account. and in that time another £67,000 is transferred out of the account. in total, jack lost £165,000. so far, none of this money has been refunded. revolut says it takes fraud incredibly seriously and has approaches to tackle it, including delaying payments to allow customers to stop, think and complete additional checks. it also says it recently announced a new biometric identification feature and an advanced ai—scam detection feature, that protects customers against card scams. both jack and laura complained to revolut but say they didn't get very far. the premise behind the chat from revolut afterwards, that it was all my fault. because i authorised one transaction, i then authorised them all. i never thought it would affect me how it did.

it sounds pathetic, because i know worse things happen, but you're violated. your whole life, someone's just come in and taken it, and you're left there... ..out on a limb, with absolutely no help from revolut whatsoever. it feels like they're going into it with the plan of never reimbursing. so they're not trying to kind of figure out if they were liable or not — they're just saying flat—out i'io. we do see that revolut are very quick to close down their investigations. typically, their investigations will take about 2k hours, whereas other banks might take multiple days or even weeks. we've had 991 cases against revolut, and we've never had a case where they've admitted their mistake. revolut says each potential fraud case is carefully investigated so it can evaluate the full circumstances and make the most informed decision. if a customer's unhappy with how they've been treated, they can file a complaint to the financial 0mbudsman service.

in 2023, it received more than 3,500 complaints about revolut — more than any other bank or e—money institution. it's clear that the way that other banks act around scam and fraud activity is significantly better and gives a lot more confidence to scam victims — if they were to end up in this sort of situation — that they would get their money back. but the fact that we are seeing so many claims with the financial 0mbudsman service about revolut shows that, actually, revolut aren't doing enough to act in this area. recently, the european central bank asked revolut to enhance its financial crime controls and governance. in europe, revolut has held a banking licence since 2021. here, its expected to become britain's newest fully—fledged bank in about a year. if revolut are successful in gaining a full banking licence, it means they'll be

able to offer products like credit cards, overdrafts and mortgages, and hold customers' deposits directly. this also means the stakes are higher for their customers if they're targeted by a scammer. i suppose you could question whether, given there are so many complaints, whether revolut should have a licence. i think there might be a political element to revolut's licensing. because it is so big, because it's becoming of a size to challenge high—street banks, and i think no government would want to have something of that size playing fast and loose with the rules. the treasury says it has no role in decisions of this kind. the decision on whether to grant revolut authorisation to act as a bank lies with the independent regulators. the independent regulators declined to comment. earlier this month, new rules came in to make all banks

and electronic money institutions reimburse victims of fraud. the majority of scam victims will now be reimbursed their money automatically, up to the value of £85,000. at which, however, we're concerned that while this £85,000 figure sounds high, the figure was initially set at £a15,000, meaning that we feel that the incentive is no longer there for companies to take fraud seriously. revolut says it abides by the same regulatory standards as any high—street bank, and it's sorry to hear of any instance where customers have been targeted by criminals. it says it can't comment onjack and laura's cases as they're being looked at by the financial 0mbudsman service. it says it cut fraud by 20% last year, but acknowledges there's always more to do. while we hear from many people who use revolut who are very pleased with the service, what we would say is that they have a track record

of not reimbursing people who fall victim to fraud. we also know that there is a track record of money being taken from accounts even after scam activity has been reported. so obviously, that is a huge issue and why we at which? wouldn't recommend banking large sums of money with revolut. both laura and jack are still waiting for a decision from the financial 0mbudsman service. ijust had to kind of try and move on, really, and just try and figure out how to kind of make ends meet and just carry on with life. i'm really grateful it happened to me and not somebody else, because i think this might have pushed somebody who might not have been as strong over the edge. but it took me to a precipice i didn't think i'd ever be on. revolut likes to think of itself as a rocket ship, moving fast and breaking things. but facing new regulations and the requirements of a full banking licence, this poster

child of the online—banking revolution may find it finally has no choice but to grow up. hello. we've got our first named storm of the season, so a notch up on what we've had so far this autumn. we'll all feel the effects of storm ashley. widespread gales but a met office amber warning for some stormy weather for the western

side of scotland. more rain to come with it as well — you can see it developing here in the atlantic. it will rapidly develop in the next 18—24 hours and even ahead of it, some typical autumnal wind and rain with us at the moment, moving its way eastwards to clear across scotland and northern ireland, western fringes of england and wales by the morning time. so, quite chilly in these areas and there could be some low level fog to watch out for. under our rain band, it's misty, murky with hill fog and much milder than it was last night, but it does mean a slow start to saturday for eastern parts of england. it could be that that rain drags its heels into the afternoon but for most of us, it's the quieter day of the weekend. the winds are lighter, there'll be some sunshine just a scattering of showers, so i think it will feel quite pleasant. eventually, that rain clears from east anglia as we head towards the middle part of the afternoon, so 15—17 — just a little bit above average. but then as we go through the night, we start to see this next area of low pressure, this deepening storm coming our way with windy weather and rain for all parts.

as i say, it's a notch up on what we've seen so far this autumn, so widespread gales — particularly around the coast, on the hills, but even inland for some. a spell again of very wet weatherfor a time. and then it brightens up with a few showers but more rain and another escalation in the winds. it looks stronger still in the north and west. bear in mind as well we've got high tides at the moment, so we may well have some coastal flooding as well — another hazard. so, these sort of wind speeds enough to bring down the trees that are in full leaf, cause some travel disruption as well and structural damage, and even more ferocious — the feeling at the moment is that western scotland will have gusts of wind up to 80 miles an hour during the course of sunday, so it's definitely one to watch before it looks as if it'll scoot away into the north sea across to scandinavia, leaving us with a brisk westerly wind, possibly more rain coming into the south and the east on monday. but at the moment, it's a couple of days of quieter weather, sunny spells and showers. we may even see high pressure into the middle part of the week, but there's more on the storm on the website.

live from washington, this is bbc news. dozens of people are reported to have been killed in israeli strikes on the jabalia refugee camp in northern gaza. it comes after president biden said there was potential for a path to ending the conflict in the middle east, after the killing of hamas leader, yahya sinwar. presidential hopefuls, kamala harris and donald trump, hold duelling rallies in michigan, looking to secure crucial votes. i'm helena humphrey.

glad you could join me. we start with the latest on gaza. the hamas—run civil defense agency says dozens of people have been killed in israeli strikes on the jabalia refugee camp, with more than 80 also wounded. there's been no immediate israeli comment. local sources indicate northern gaza is effectively isolated, with telecommunications and internet services severed. the director of al—awda hospital had told reporters about an overwhelming influx of casualties. it's believed around 400,000 people are trapped inside the camp, without food or water. meanwhile, we've heard more reaction today from world leaders on israel's killing of hamas leader, yahya sinwar. us president biden said the so—called "quad" of western allies agrees there is a road to peace, though he acknowledged it would be "difficult" to reach a ceasefire in gaza. on friday, a senior hamas member confirmed sinwar was killed, but says his death will only strengthen the group.

the bbc has learned that hamas members will meet soon