Hi,
I’ve topped-up my card this afternoon with 200£ and used TFL different transports throughout the day. After 8pm I received some notifications about transactions in Brazil! The card is with me in the UK and has always been! I have now no money available on my card.
I’ve frozen the card for now. Please help me, have I been a victim of some kind of phishing?
Thank you
Probably cloned. Contact support in app with full details. They’re the only people who can help you.
As @BobT said, you’ll need to contact Monzo to sort this out.
Interestingly though, you’re the second person in a few days to say that your card has been used fraudulently in Brazil.
You must’ve come across a “skimmer” device (planted at an ATM or card reader) that read the magstripe and then the fraudster resold it on the black market. No big deal as you’ve frozen the card (though even if not frozen you’ll be fine as long as you keep magstripe disabled in the options), just request a card replacement and you’ll be good to go.
Thanks guys, I’ve contacted the support chat in the app (no luck yet)
I’ve never used an ATM with Monzo so far. I am still new using Monzo, I have only made one transaction with my PIN and it was at a restaurant. All the other transactions were at TFL or groceries small contactless payments.
Restaurants are notoriously fertile skimming grounds: minimum-wage, high turnover of staff and opportunity to take the card out of sight of the customer and/or view the PIN being entered.
Did you give your card to the server to take away? Best practice is never let go of your card, watch the server place the card directly into the card machine and cover your PIN. Never let anyone take your card out of your sight, even just below behind the bar.
But contact Monzo and they should return your money to your account.
Do we not have location security with Monzo. Would this have helped in this instance as I was under the impression that this is exactly what it was for.
Agreed. I would like an explanation in regards to this…
You can only disable magstripe ATMs though right? Not all magstripe transactions
Correct. Although at POS the card will only allow magstripe if there is no fallback (ie. no chip and pin).
We do. But I believe it is turned OFF by default. Presumably for battery/privacy reasons.
Wouldn’t Monzo detect that a TfL auth and a transaction in Brazil on the same day was a little odd?
Which makes me wonder, do Monzo do anything if they think a transaction is fraudulent? E.g. Lloyds will text me and I can reply to say if it’s me or not, and I can try the transaction again and it usually goes through.
I rather thought Monzo did some cool AI here to detect suspicious transactions 
Is the “We” here iOS users again? The Android app doesn’t request location permission.
By ‘we’ I meant Monzo users. I wasn’t aware that Monzo hadn’t added location based security to the Android version.