I was thinking. Altho I never had any problems with getting my card abused on the internet, I did have my card skimmed a couple of times over the years.
The way banks deal with this is that you fill out the forms, they cancel your card, and issue a new one. If you are lucky, and you stay in your home country, you are back to using a new card in a good week or 10 days, depending on a bank.
If this however happens when you are traveling, you are stuck half way across the globe with the card that you cannot use anymore, and possibly banks, that cannot issue an emergency card.
I think a very cool solution we be, that the Revolut mastercard would basically be “blank”, no numbers no nothing just a magstripe and chip. If you card gets skimmed, you simply “reissue” a new card within the app, and a “blank” physical card would suddenly have a different number and so forth.
Would something like that be possible to implement ?
You’ll just need to block your card in the app, and contact support to request an Emergency Card. If in the UK, we can send this via first class or next day delivery. If outside the UK we can send this via DHL, which is often next day in EU metro areas. The emergency card acts as a regular card, just won’t have your name printed on it!
Yes, that is all good and convenient in most cases. The problem is, when you spend a lot of time in places like Asia, middle east, oceania and waiting for delivery there can either take a long time, and if you move around a lot, quite likely impossible…
Relying on a single card for overseas travel is asking for trouble. Always better to have access to cash at a cost than be left high and dry in the middle of nowhere. So make sure you have a few back up cards while traveling as the cards can get rejected for a number of reasons not necessarily involving fraud.
There is a solution currently in the works, see for example http://privacy.com/. Will be great if Revolut could implement this at some point.
Naturally I never rely only on one card. But keep in mind that if you travel for a month or so, and move around a lot, getting revolut card skimmed makes you unable to use the cheapest and best card out there. Suddenly you rely on your banks card, and your trip becomes suddenly more expensive because of that.
That is why it would be cool to have somehow an option to get a card reprogrammed somehow within the app. Not sure if that is possible due to technical reasons…but would be cool nevertheless.