Avoiding credit card fraud with Revolut
Always careful. Even so, the unthinkable happened. I am a victim of credit card fraud.
Two weeks ago, I received one of those terrible SMS saying, “Your credit card ****XXXX was blocked. Please call us at YYYYYY”. Later in the day, I called them back and asked what was going on. After a long waiting, one assistant answered on the other side of the line. This is a more or less accurate transcription of the call:
(Assistant) 📞 Sir, several purchases were performed with your card with the amount of $27 (always $27!) for an Apple.com iTunes service over the last three days. We don’t believe those were you. Therefore we blocked your card.
(Me) 👨🏻🦲 Good that you blocked the card. I also checked the credit card app and saw those transactions today. It was not me. I don’t even have any subscriptions active that could justify the charges.
📞 Good that you confirm. We will send you a new card. It must arrive next week.
👨🏻🦲 Sounds good, thank you.
Nothing could have prepared me for the last advice of the assistant:
📞 Please check your next invoice with attention. You have 30 days to complain if you see any transactions that you didn’t make.
I was almost speechless.
👨🏻🦲 If you think it was not me and I confirm it was not me, how come it will be on the next invoice?
📞 Please do check. It may happen.
Well, you guessed, the assistant was right. It happened. Here is a mesmerizing sample extracted from my invoice:
Only three transactions, right? I didn’t want to be verbose. There are three pages worth of those. An interesting total of $540. All with the same description and the same amount. Yes, yes, of course, I will complain.
However, what perturbs me the most is that I don’t know where and when my card info was leaked. In what circumstances I was not careful enough? What did I do wrong? These questions are still haunting me today. Therefore I decided to adopt a process to reduce the possibility of this happening again to the maximum.
Online One-time payments with Revolut Disposable Cards
Every one-time payment transaction I will do online will be performed using disposable cards. This means that the card is destroyed after a transaction occurs, and a new one is created. One payment happens, and the card is no longer valid. How awesome is that?
Online Recurring payments with Revolut Virtual Cards
Of course, for subscriptions (recurring payments), I can’t use disposable virtual cards. I would have to configure a new one once per month per subscription! I am quite diligent, but there’s a limit to it.
Fortunately, there are non-disposable virtual cards that I can create, give them a name, and set a monthly limit. If the service tries to charge a higher value than the specified limit, no payment will happen until I review the limit. The perfect solution to pay online subscriptions.
All other payments with Revolut Virtual Cards
For all the other payments, I created a Revolut Virtual Card and added it to Apple Pay and use it just like any normal card. This way, I can set up at least a monthly limit for all the purchases. If the card gets somehow leaked, I can destroy it and create another. If it were a physical card, I would have to pay for a new one.
Peace of mind
With this setup, I only use the credit card in Revolut to load funds. Then all Revolut cards act as pre-paid cards. I only need to pay attention to the funds and load enough funds for the month or purchases. This is a drawback, but I have several advantages:
- If some fraud happens with a Revolut Disposable card: it can only be used once, and it is limited to the funds currently added to the Revolut account;
- If some fraud happens with a Revolut Virtual card: it is limited to the monthly limit I’ve set, and I can destroy the card without having to pay to have a new one;
- If some fraud happens with a Revolut Physical card: it is limited to the funds currently loaded in the account; In this case, I would have to pay for a new card;
- If some fraud happens with my credit card: the leak happened in Revolut as I don’t use the card anywhere else!
These advantages justify the extra step of adding the funds to the Revolut account as I need them. It’s repetitive but only takes 2 seconds. From now on, my credit card is safely deposited home.
I decided to use Revolut because I was already using to save some bucks while exchanging currencies. Especially on working days, the fees are very low. However, other providers offer features similar to disposable cards and virtual cards. They may also be worth exploring if you are not using Revolut.
