Revolut today announces a new feature of its app aimed at safety: the detection of scams on payment cards enhanced byartificial intelligence. In addition to the protections already in place, this new feature identifies risky transactions, to “outsmart the criminals” and protect customers’ money.
This is something new, created internally by the Revolut team, which can determine if it exists a high probability (we always talk about machine learning, not certainties) that the customer is making a card payment as part of a scam; in case of a positive outcome, the customer will have to provide some additional information on the transaction he is attempting, to verify its “honesty”.
The app will also show “specific educational stories” about similar scams to get the user thinking about them, while also allowing them to chat with an in-house fraud specialistwhich can help him understand if he actually ended up as part of a scam.
This feature had been in testing for some time, and led to a 30% reduction in transactions reported as fraud against those merchants who are most commonly involved in fraud.
To give some context, according to data collected by Revolut, in 2023 investment scams they represented 16% of the total, but they reaped 36% of all the money lost due to scams, a sign of how dangerous they are, given the amount of money involved. The shopping scamswhich are much more common (around 70% in Italy), represent less than 29% of the overall value lost, because in any case they concern lower figures.
