Etude Coffee London: Help us recover from banking fraud

This is a message we had never hoped to write however sadly earlier this week we were victims of a sophisticated banking fraud which has resulted in the loss of over £9,000 and has wiped our London café's bank account.

Our café only opened recently and this has come at a time where we felt like we were making real strides embedding ourself in the community of Crystal Palace and seeing the business go from strength to strength.

On 6 August 2024 one of our team fell victim to a fraud involving a scammer gaining access to our bank account, phoning us up and imitating a member of Revolut (our bank provider’s) fraud department asking us to verify a fraudulent transaction of £130.95 which was showing in our banking app. It appears they then used this initial fraudulent transaction to generate approval codes over the phone with us to steal two much larger sums of money amounting to £9,336.78.

Unfortunately it appears that we aren’t the first business to be affected by this type of scam and there are countless others who have lost huge sums of money due to banks security measures failing and scam detection not working properly (see links below).

We have raised the incident with Revolut directly and to Action Fraud, however Revolut have already refused to refund any of the money and said they're investigating to recover the funds, it does not look like we will get anything returned from them at the moment.

We are of course devastated by this decision and now need to wait 21 days before we can raise it with the Financial Ombudsman in the hope that they will look into our case and see whether we can get anything back.

This process is likely to take many months and in the meantime the money in our account has effectively been wiped out, leaving us in an incredibly difficult and precarious position as it was put aside for employee wages, tax, national insurance and our bills.

If you are able to donate any amount of money, no matter how small, to help us recover this loss, pay our staff and keep the café going it would be incredibly appreciated.

We will keep this page updated if we hear any news from Action Fraud and the Financial Ombudsman. We will of course return any donations if we get a refund from the ombudsman at a later date.

If anyone also has any leads on lawyers / legal advice to help us fight our case we’d greatly appreciate any assistance too.

Thank you,

Mridul, Amir and the Etude Coffee London team.

Links:

• I’m a victim of scammers but Revolut says no to a refund: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/apr/10/im-a-victim-of-scammers-but-revolut-says-no-to-a-refund

• Revolut Gets More Scam Complaints Than Any Other UK Bank, Ombudsman Says: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-20/revolut-gets-more-scam-complaints-than-any-other-uk-bank-ombudsman-says?embedded-checkout=true

• Revolut customer has £40,000 wiped from account but 'can't get refund': https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/revolut-customer-40000-wiped-account-28978774