Bitcoin News

Story: Revolut Hacked: 680 Customers’ Data Stolen, 10,000 Bitcoin Ransom Demanded

By Pankaj K

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KYC's Structural Problem. That's kind of the whole issue with traditional Know Your Customer processes.

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Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Better in Theory. There's a better approach sitting on the shelf, mostly unused.

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Why Adoption Is Stuck. The Financial Action Task Force — FATF — actually offers guidance that allows digital ID systems…

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A hacker tricked Revolut into handing over passport copies and sensitive data belonging to 680 customers — then demanded 10,000 Bitcoin as ransom.

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Lyudmyla Kozlovska of Open Dialogue flagged the mechanics of the attack. The hacker didn't break through a firewall or brute-force a database.

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That's kind of the whole issue with traditional Know Your Customer processes. They work by collecting massive amounts of personal data — passports, selfies, proof of address —…

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The Revolut breach didn't happen in isolation. In 2026 alone, 343 million people in the United States were affected by data breaches. That's not a rounding error.

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The problem isn't that Revolut did something uniquely reckless. It's that the whole industry runs on a model that creates these vulnerabilities by design.

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And the EU's regulatory framework, meant to protect citizens, got weaponized here. The attacker knew that a company facing a formal-looking law enforcement request from within…

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There's a better approach sitting on the shelf, mostly unused. Zero-knowledge proofs — a cryptographic method that lets you verify something is true without actually revealing…

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The EU is already moving in this direction. Its digital identity frameworks are being built to support selective disclosure — the idea that you share only what's needed for a…

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Related: Gamdom CEO Felix Römers Bitcoin Transactions Exposed in Revolut Ransomware Attack

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It's a cleaner model. Less data stored means less data to steal.

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But it's not widely deployed in financial KYC yet. Not even close.

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The Financial Action Task Force — FATF — actually offers guidance that allows digital ID systems for customer verification without requiring physical document storage.

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