When Lauren’s husband received an odd phone call from his bank, alarm bells rang…
I heard the faint ringing of my phone as I put the last of the children’s clothes into the wardrobe.
It was my husband
Angel, he often checked in with me after I’d dropped the boys at school.
‘Hiya,’ he said, ‘Guess what? I’ve just been really lucky.’
‘Really, how come?’ I asked.
Angel, 40, explained that the fraud team from his bank Revolut had called to say someone had been trying to get into his business account.
Call it instinct, but alarm bells started to ring immediately.
Oh my God, this sounds like a scam, I thought.
‘Are you sure they were genuine?’ I asked, nervously.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I was worried at first, but they knew all the activity on my account without me giving them any details.’
‘How long were you on the phone?’ I asked.
‘About 30 minutes,’ he replied.
‘What did they say?’ I said, trying to keep calm.
Angel said they’d asked him if he’d made a transaction in B&Q on the Isle of Wight, where we lived.
‘I had bought something from there, so I thought they were the real deal,’ he told me.
He said they then told him someone was trying to withdraw money from his account at that very moment.
‘The man said we needed to stop this person in their tracks,’ Angel told me.
The man explained that Angel had been sent an email.
Sure enough, an email had arrived a few minutes before Angel took the call, explaining that an iPhone from London
was trying to log into his account.
Angel said the email looked like a legitimate Revolut address.
I felt fear rising inside me as I wondered what on earth was going on.
The man from the bank had then asked Angel to send over
a selfie.
‘You sent him a selfie?’ I asked, incredulously.
‘That’s what I did when I set up the Revolut account,’ he replied, ‘So I didn’t think there was anything wrong.’
But I knew instinctively that something was very wrong.
‘Oh my God, Angel, you need to go into your bank account now!’ I said.
He hung up
and tried to access his account.
Please don’t
let this be a scam, I prayed.
Angel had spent years building up his small business fitting bathrooms, but now I felt this terrible sense of foreboding.
Suddenly, the phone rang, and it was Angel.
‘Oh my God, they stole my money!’ he screamed, practically hyperventilating with distress.
It was terrifying to hear him so upset.
Maybe it’s just a couple of grand, I reasoned, trying to stay calm.
‘It’s over £20,000!’ Angel said, his voice hoarse with shock.
What?!
The blood drained from me, and I felt my knees weaken.
‘I was meant to move the money to my other account this morning, but something went wrong with the transfer,’ he said, his voice weak.
‘Shall I come to you?’ I asked, worried about him driving.
‘No, I’ll come home,’ he replied.
Twenty minutes later, Angel was at the front door.
Ashen faced, he walked into the house.
It turned out it had taken
the scammers just four
minutes to steal £24,105.50 over 26 separate transfers.
‘There’s just £9 left in the account,’ Angel said.
I felt sick to my stomach.
‘What should we do?’ he asked.
All I could think was to call the police.
I called 999 and reported
it, but the officer advised me to get in touch with Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud
and cyber crime.
We did. A lady took our
details and suggested that we contact Revolut.
But try as we might, we couldn’t find a contact number for them anywhere.
‘We’ll have to speak to them using the ChatBot,’ I said.
For the next hour, we explained to the ChatBot what had happened, but it felt as though we were going round in circles, talking to a robot and growing increasingly frustrated.
I looked at my husband, who was pale with shock.
‘I’m just so sorry,’ he said.
I felt awful for him.
We’d met in 2017 and married in 2019, settling on the Isle of Wight where we were bringing up our boys, aged four and 13.
Angel had moved here from Spain and all he wanted to do was provide for his family and
be a good husband and father.
I wanted to do everything in my power to support him. But it was hard to know where to turn over the next few days.
There was nothing in our account, yet we still had to pay the mortgage and bills and buy food, not to mention Angel’s business overheads.
‘How will we manage?’ he asked me in despair.
I knew I had to stay strong.
Every evening when the boys got home from school, we tried to keep things normal.
But Angel was so upset, he couldn’t even work for the first few weeks. It was heartbreaking seeing the toll that it was taking on him.
Each night, he’d go out for a walk, unable to eat or sleep properly.
We called the Citizens Advice Bureau who said we should contact them again once we were in debt, and they would then see what they could do.
But we don’t want it to get that far, I thought.
The only immediate help
we received was from a local charity called Isle of Help who gave us £300 worth of Tesco food vouchers.
What had our lives come to?
I kept thinking about the people who had done this cruel thing to us.
Angel said the caller had been a well-spoken man with an English accent.
How was this man able to sleep at night when he’d done something like this to our family?
Meanwhile, Angel had to close his account and lay off his employees.
We contacted our utility companies who said they would delay our payments.
However, the Inland Revenue weren’t so generous, declaring there would be no extension for the £3000 Corporation Tax we owed.
‘But I didn’t do anything wrong,’ Angel told them.
There didn’t seem to be one umbrella organisation which could advise us.
We appealed to Revolut to refund us the money, but they refused, claiming Angel had given the scammer details which allowed them to log in to his account.
That wasn’t true – they were already inside Angel’s account when they called him.
We also contacted our MP
Bob Seely and the Financial Ombudsman (FO), which asked us to submit an application.
Soon after, it was Angel’s
40th birthday.
We’d planned to go back to Valencia in Spain to visit family, but there was no way we could find the money.
A few weeks later, we were finally told by the FO that HSBC, where the scammers deposited our money, had returned £9123 via Revolut to us.
It’s not even half of what we lost,
but at least it’s something.
We’re still waiting to hear whether
we’ll get the rest, and in the meantime Angel is back working.
These people are criminals, they ruin lives and there has to be tighter regulations.
We don’t want any other family to go through what we have.
Lauren Fernandez, 41, Isle of Wight