Been waiting nearly three weeks, my app still saying we’re veryifying account information, uninstalled and reinstalled the app, logged in, still saying we’re veryifying your information. I have been asked to send photos and Id by email but not sure if it is safe to do so.
It was 6 days, 6 days ago when you asked last time?
I’m not sure why they want it emailed, maybe they don’t trust what you’ve submitted so far? Some people wouldn’t trust sending it via email, some would. Only you can make that call. But if they’ve asked for it, I wouldn’t have thought you’ll get an account without doing it.
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In terms of ‘is it safe’, so long as you are emailing an address with one of these domains, it’s (edit) relatively safe in that it will go to Monzo, but it wouldn’t be encrypted so it’s not impossible someone may intercept it.
@monzo.com
@monzomail.com
@monzoemail.com
If you have been asked to email any other domain by anyone, I would email help@monzo.com to figure out what’s going on first.
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Yeah it was 6 days ago but I was waiting over a week beforehand, I gave my id and photo when I applied for the account so was not sure why they were asking to send it again via email.
Nope. It is never safe to send sensitive or private documents over unencrypted email.
Don’t do this.
There was another thread on here recently that discussed another sort of issue preceding to Monzo making a similar request. I’ll try to find this thread because I’m sure an alternative option was offered by a Monzo employee at the time.
I’ll update this post when I find it. In the meantime, please don’t go sending a copy of your passport over email. It’s not secure, regardless of who is requesting it.
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It’s a good point. Although I’d say that’s a particular approach to security - people send emails with this stuff all the time (eg to employers when signing contracts), and there’s not a huge amount that can be done with a passport scan really. I’d still be happy to do it, but it was probably not right to say it was ‘safe’.
If you are concerned, you can certainly encrypt it before sending I suppose and send the encryption key through the chat or something like that. Or maybe Monzo have PGP keys 
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Some organisations like the local council do tend to request documents over email and most of the times you don’t really have a choice. It’s just the reality of things
So I found the thread, and the reply from @AlanDoe here:
Not an ideal response, and I remembered it wrong.
I’d personally reply back to the email asking for a more secure method of providing the documents they’re requesting.
I find it baffling that Monzo don’t just make secure help accessible within the app itself from any screen during onboarding so they can assist with issues like this better.
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I’m not an expert but I would imagine providing secure document transfer on any device might be complex? And the need quite niche?
Really hard to make consumer friendly ways to achieve end to end encryption. Especially when so many peoples devices are already somehow compromised.
Monzo’s chat should be encrypted in transit, and be stored securely and with integrity on their end. So it’s secure to send sensitive details over that.
I wouldn’t say encryption in transit is particularly complex or niche, it’s rather easy to implement and is very much the norm nowadays. Email is the outlier that just hasn’t kept up, though I suspect we’ll start seeing a push on this front from big tech sooner or later.
It would be ideal if companies would move onto platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage business chat and offer support that way as opposed, or in addition to email. Those are secure, encrypted channels.
I think Freetrade use Dropbox to augment securely sharing your documents if you don’t pass the onboarding checks. It’s a bit finicky, but it does the job. Perhaps that’s an option for Monzo here too. There’s always snail mail too, though the layer of security is quite weak, but better than nothing if all else fails.
I think it all depends on your threat model though. I would never send sensitive documents over email without end to end PGP. Others might be okay with it though. Whilst there is always a threat, I don’t believe it’s a particularly major one, especially if you’re on a network you trust.
Worth noting there are other steps you could take yourself to send documents securely over email. I believe protonmail offers a service for just that, and I’ve used it in the past for those pesky obnoxious computer says no counsels @ndrw mentioned.
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The thing is Monzo already has an encrypted channel - their in-app chat. Email is used only for exceptional cases which is why I say the need is niche.
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