Revolut uses AI to protect customers from card scams and break the scammers „spell”

Since the launch of the card scam detection feature, Revolut has observed a 30% reduction in the fraud losses resulting from card scams where the money is sent to merchants linked to finance and investments.

Revolut, the global financial app with more than 35 million customers worldwide, has today announced the launch of an advanced scam detection feature to help protect customers from card scams. „Revolut customers can now experience an added layer of security protection, on top of the technology already in place to detect APP scams (Authorised Push Payment), that happen when criminals trick the user to get them to transfer money to another account), which uses a sophisticated AI-based feature that is able to identify risky transactions, outsmart criminals and protect customer’s finances.” according to the press release.

Revolut’s new AI-scam feature uses sophisticated machine learning to detect if a customer is being scammed, and therefore break the ‘spell’ of the scammer before they send their money to the criminal.

Built internally by Revolut’s financial crime team, the new feature can determine if there is a high likelihood that the customer is making a card payment as part of a scam, and if so, decline the payment. The customer is then protected from performing other similar payments and sent through a scam intervention flow in-app. During this phase the customer needs to provide some additional information about the transaction they were attempting, with the goal of checking whether the customer is being guided by someone and under the scammers ‘spell’. They are then also shown specific scam educational stories to prompt customers to think in-depth before they make the payment. Revolut can also redirect the customer into a chat with a Revolut fraud specialist who will then ask them further questions in order to determine if they are being scammed.

David Eborne, Head of Fraud at Revolut, said: „We’re very excited to be launching our new AI-scam feature which implements advanced technology to interrupt fraudsters taking advantage of everyday people. We’ve spent months innovating and testing the product to ensure that customers can continue to spend and send their money safely. For example, a growing number of banks are increasingly restricting or heavily limiting the ability to make card payments to crypto and investment websites. With this advanced feature, rather than completely block those transactions, we ensure that customers who want to perform legitimate payments continue to do so, but also intervene to protect those who are being guided by criminals to make fraudulent ones. We are giving our customers both freedom and security at the same time”.

In 2023, according to global Revolut data, 59% of all money lost to APP scams came through investment scams, despite only representing 14% of the total number of cases This shows that life changing sums of money were being lost across comparatively few cases. Conversely, Purchase Scams were the most common type of APP scam, representing 62% of global scam cases across the same period, but less than 9% of the overall value lost, showing that smaller scams were more common but with lower monetary losses.

The new AI card scam feature is live in the Revolut app and available to customers worldwide.

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Revolut is a licensed bank launched in 2015, in the UK, offering money transfer and exchange. Today, more than 35 million customers around the world use Revolut’s products to make more than half a billion transactions a month.