For those who don’t know, Revolut is an online banking startup that is meant to change the whole banking system.
I do recommend it to all my friends but there are things you should know before you start using it.
Imagine that you send money to a friend of yours who is identified as Revolut user (blue ‘R’ in front of the name).
Then you go to transactions history and see that you’ve just sent your money to an absolutely unknown person.
Don’t start your endless chat with Revolut support they will not help you anyway.
Here is what happened.
Revolut identifies all users by their phone number. The trick is that before the transfer is made Revolut shows you the name as it is written in your phone book while after the transfer is made it shows you the name of the person who is registered in Revolut under this phone number. Did you get the issue?
Imagine that a friend of yours stopped using certain phone number few years ago but you still store it in the contact list of your phone. Mobile operator gave that phone number to another person who decided to start using Revolut as well. Revolut knows that this phone number is under another person name which doesn’t match with the name in your phone book but it will not show you this until you make the transfer thinking that you are sending money to your friend.
Revolut support team confirmed this logic and gave no sign that it is wrong and they plan to change it. Surely, they declined to return money/revert transaction without recipient approval.
During a day long chat with Revolut another more important issue was discovered. I asked to give me their bank license details to make a complaint. They rejected to do so by saying that they do not operate under any bank license. So I would not recommend to store any big amount on Revolut.
