Background

Revolut marketed itself as a British bank but was actually started by Russian and Ukrainian co-founders Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko and runs a great deal, if not all of its operations out of small eastern European countries with less safeguards against corruption. See also: Raiffeisen Bank Conflict.

Timeline

Early 2022: Revolut informs me that selling rubles may become difficult, which was tolerable, since I had no plans to sell them anytime soon.

March 28, 2022: Revolut informs me that I cannot withdraw my rubles or transfer them to another bank. I complain to their customer support.

April 2022: No progress.

May 2022: No progress.

June 17, 2022: Revolut informs me that I must sell my rubles by August 23. I file one of many complaints with Revolut.

July 1, 2022: Without warning Revolut freezes my account almost two months before the deadline and prevents me from withdrawing funds.

August 1, 2022: I file a complaint with the Financial Ombudsman Service.

September 2022: No progress.

October 2022: No progress.

November 2022: No progress.

December 2022: Revolut no longer has a UK banking license.

Jan 2023: No progress.

February 7, 2023: The Financial Ombudsman Service requests more information and to confirm if I still want the blocked account investigated.

February 9, 2023: I confirm that I still want it investigated and provide links to this page which contains the proofs and details they seek.

February 14, 2023: The Financial Ombudsman Service asks whether I have received a final response from Revolut and informs me that they will be asking Revolut for permission to investigate "both" of my claims under one filing reference (though I explicitly stated when filing it was a single issue).

February 16, 2023: I provide emails that show Revolut has repeatedly neglected to clearly respond to my questions asking what their final response is.

May 22, 2023: Having rejected the understandable but incorrect and suspicious assessment of my inspector, Frederic Moore, I give permission for my case to be submit to an ombudsman for review after a brief delay.

Oct 16, 2023: 19 months later, I am still awaiting justice.

Nov 21, 2023: Nearly 2 years after the incident, Ombudsman Esperanza Fuentes dismisses my complaint, writing that she has "seen no evidence to suggest this is what happened" after refusing my request to speak to her (to provide the evidence). She also left many of my points unaddressed and incorrectly concluded that I did not suffer any meaningful loss.

The Incident

Revolut attempted to exploit short-sighted emotional sentiments about legal holders of Russian currency for their own private gains at the long-term expense of the UK financial and legal sectors' reputations. They broke their own commitment to give me 2 months to sell or withdraw my rubles which not only deprived me of my right to trade them at an opportune moment, but also negatively impacted a few hundred thousand dollars of leveraged stock positions during a bad economic cycle which caused me to need more margin than should have been necessary, charged at a high interest rate. This also delayed, if not irredeemably derailed, my other very important (and socially benevolent) plans for nearly a year so far. They then sold my rubles at a price of their choosing (likely pocketing the profit) which I never would have accepted. Though I must claim that only a few hundred thousand dollars of stocks were impacted, in reality these assets were worth much more, but this would be complicated, if not impossible to prove now, precisely due to these types of interferences.

The activity of trading, is quite literally ALL about timing. To indicate a particular timeframe in which to make a trade, and then change the duration after it has been set, is an obvious and outrageous breach of one the most fundamental aspects of our client-bank relationship. Clearly Revolut has outright lied to their customers in a move to profit off the confusion and timing, using our own capital against us.

What is Really Going On

There are many speculations that one could make about Revolut's true motivations during this suspicious conflict, but one of the most concrete is that my account contains an anomaly that represents a serious oversight in their registration process which they don't want regulators to notice because it could mandate penalties and rewriting of their processes, which could become tremendously more expensive than my stolen rubles and provoke further investigations into their operations. But instead of quickly resolving my complaint last March, they forced me to risk a lot of valuable time and effort trying to correct and expose their shenanigans (which I should be compensated for if my work helps others).

It seems their business plan has been to deliberately create a confusing trap, then politely present it as some kind of misunderstanding, and then drag it out with an extremely slow, passive-aggressive and psychologically painful customer support experience for many months, to make getting down to the core problem too confusing, expensive, risky and work-intensive for people without a law degree to persist through. Clearly their millions of customers have been exploited and silenced by a ruthless corporation well-versed in white-collar crime and every single one of us should be recompensed!

Unclickable Formal Complaint Links

Since the app was designed to conceal its bad intentions, it can be difficult to produce hard evidence after-the-fact that it was systematically designed to evade its legal responsibilities. But ONE clear proof that it deterred customer complaints from being filed are its unclickable long links. Of course a determined customer could manually type the link into a browser, as I tried (only to face further technical problems that were impossible to clearly record with a screenshot). But the point this screenshot proves is that Revolut must have intentionally deterred millions of customers from filing complaints (unless my account was specifically manipulated) since there can be no other reason why a huge online bank would fail to include the few words of code required to make these crucial links clickable.

Names of Customer Support Agents

Revolut has used a number of underhanded tactics to deter reporting of complaints, like providing unclickable long formal complaint links (now possibly fixed, though the omittance of this most basic feature could not have been an accident) and creating an overall customer service experience so frustrating that only the most persistent complaints can ever be heard. Precisely how many of their 25 million customers' complaints they managed to prevent is an important question someone should investigate. But in line with their policy of general obfuscation, they've made it impossible to identify who was responsible for the many greivances which surpass even my patience to delineate. But at least the first names of the involved customer service agents are provided in the transcripts below so that if anyone at Revolut cares, they can have some idea of where to make improvements (though it'd be much better to address the systemic high-level problems instead).

Revolut Employees, Investors & Board of Directors

I don't know whether these are bad people — but I know they worked for a bad company:

Customer Support Transcripts

These are chronological, abridged (but not misleading) screenshots from a series of frustrating customer support chats. It is not necessary to post the full pdfs (but I can provide them upon request) since they only omit irrelevant tirades.

Stolen Rubles - March 28, 2022 (PNX-4525203-G8N3)

I cannot attest to the validity of the claim that transfering rubles was ever truly disabled, but obviously it is implied when selling a currency that transfering or withdrawing it should be possible. Clearly the act of buying something entails the right to possession or movement of it. I have no record of ever receiving the link he referenced.

Stolen Rubles - June 17, 2022 (PNX-4525203-G8N3)

At this point I had already asked them for final responses about many issues, which they often neglected to provide, but they did verify that they received my complaint.

Blocked Account - August 21, 2022 (PNX-4525987-X3M5)

Though it may initially seem that I was being unduly rude to the seemingly polite customer service representatives, do not be fooled. This conversation, which stretched for weeks, only occured after I had already been having dozens of other similarily horrendous customer support chats for months and could already see through their deception. I was denied my right to close the account and find another provider since they were holding my savings hostage, depriving me of vital information, and preventing any real communication when every moment counted.

This aggravating blocked account incident was initially drawn out for 19 (especially important) days before my account was finally reopened. I still haven't received compensation for the issue of my rubles being stolen (and all the repercussions that caused) nearly a year later.

Takeaways

Is this the kind of blatant exploitation investors can expect in the UK or will the Financial Ombudsman Service get me sufficient compensation? I'll post the answer soon enough. It's nice to see Revolut no longer has a UK banking license but why were they given one in the first place?

Closing Statement

Regardless of how skillfully these unscrupulous white-collar criminals cover their tracks and dance around loopholes to exploit the common man (like they think it's some psychopathic game of chess), regulators need to use common sense and basic human decency to overrule and harshly punish their bullshit if we are to have a functioning world rather than one driven to the brink of open war.