Revolut handed over passport scans to fraudulent requests sent from a real government domain

A request for customer records arrived from a government agency's real email domain, and Revolut answered it. The company's account of what happened is one sentence. "Revolut recently identified a sophisticated external impersonation scam where an unauthorised third party utilised a legitimate government agency domain email to submit fraudulent requests for information," the spokesperson said ^[5]. Revolut did not say whether the agency's mailbox was compromised or the address was spoofed ^[13].

The remedy on the record is address-level. Revolut said it blocked the email address, alerted the relevant government agency, law enforcement and relevant regulators, and that "Revolut systems and customer funds are unaffected" ^[6]. All of that can be true and still leave the person who staffs a legal request queue on Monday with nothing new to work with.

The notification to customers, which TechCrunch reviewed, lists birth dates, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, and copies of identity documents including passports and driver's licenses ^[2]. Revolut said the data may also have included verification selfies, account statements and transaction histories ^[3]. A phone number can be changed in an afternoon. A passport image sitting next to the selfie taken to verify it is the exact bundle someone needs to pass as that customer somewhere else. ZachXBT, the crypto security researcher who published Revolut's customer email late on Friday, said the incident appeared to have been targeted at high net worth users ^[8].

"Limited" is the only quantity Revolut has attached to the incident ^[4], set against more than 80 million customers and bank operations in more than 30 countries ^[7]. If the targeting ZachXBT described holds up, the selection matters more than the size: a handful of deliberately chosen wealthy account holders is a worse outcome than a random sample of the same count.

Teams tell themselves an inbound request has been verified because it came in on an official channel. A sender domain proves the sender controlled a mailbox at that domain. A more useful sort for a request desk runs on two axes: whether the requester was confirmed on a route they did not choose, and whether the data being released can be reissued. Passwords and account numbers can be. Passport scans, verification selfies and transaction histories cannot. Anything in the second group should not move on a sender domain alone. The control is a callback to a number the agency itself publishes: it costs turnaround time in the queue, and it takes the decision off whichever reviewer happens to open the email.

Revolut received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency earlier this month to set up a national bank, which it expects to launch in the first half of 2027 ^[11]. It is also reported to be weighing a listing that could value it at as much as $200 billion, against the $75 billion private valuation it carried in November ^[9], roughly 2.7 times the November figure ^[12].