Your Lost Bank Card

Yesterday on the bus in Dublin, someone had left behind their big umbrella. It was a rainy day, right after a promising sunny day. Typical Ireland. But what caught my eye next was a pink-and-blue rectangle on the floor on the bus. It was a Revolut card that might have fallen off someone's pocket and wallet.

The name etched on the card indicated that the person was a foreigner in the city. But that showed my own assumption: that a name that is not typically Irish might actually not be Irish, when the only culture that that person might have ever identified with could have been Irish.

But what would I do now? Go to the police? Do I really trust them? A previous encounter with a phone left behind on the Dart train which had a severely-cracked screen left me suspicious: after waiting for an hour for someone to call on that phone, as one clue to get the handset to the right hands, I went to the police, who took the phone and said that they would do the needful. Whatever that meant, they said they would not explain. 

Did the person receive their lost phone? Did they get the chance to know that someone had not stolen it but had left it behind for them? I would never know. It was too late to go back to the police station and ask them for the phone, so that I could insert a piece of paper with my number, for the person to call me and tell me that the phone had found them. The police would simply not give me the phone again, of that I was sure.

[It's not like Japan: a friend lost her engagement ring that had a massive diamond, just days before Christmas on a bus in Tokyo. On New Year's Eve, she texted that someone took the ring to the police and her fiance brought it back to her, just as I texted her that my relationship was disintegrating, and the timing made be bawl].

So what do I do with this Revolut card now? There is no way to call Revolut in Ireland to report this missing. Having lost my own items a few times, and realising that I had lost them very late (but thankfully not having anyone used the bank card on my behalf), I was concerned about the person not realising that they had lost it. Worse, what if that was the only money they carried, in the form of that card, and they were caught in a tough situation, where the only payment possible was through that singular card? Anything can go wrong when a society subtly forces everyone to go cashless. It definitely is not safe, when I could have used up that card for a purchase, or to withdraw cash, and discarded it in the rain.

Online search on that long bus ride yielded nothing other than suggesting that I reach out help on my Revolut app. So they assumed that someone who finds a lost Revolut card—a financial device without any brick-and-mortar office—would be using Revolut too. I would have preferred talking a human on the phone.

After navigating the automated "Help" section on the app, and being told what to do if I had lost my own card, I saw the prompt of chatting with a live agent. The "live agent" had a South-Asian name which made me realise that this was a change from those days when my brother called him Frank when he spent a month working at a call centre to service American Express customers [I wrote about that in The Boston Globe].

The "live agent" asks me for the first 6 digits, last 4 digits, card expiry date, and name etched on the card. I text these, even though there were too many repetitive digits to take note of correctly on a moving bus. I would have preferred talking a human on the phone.

He replies, "Thank you for sharing all the details. We are working on it."

What does that mean? Would they inform the person on their Revolut app on their phone—assuming that they had WiFi or mobile data on their phone, and assuming that their battery did not run out—that they had lost a card and someone had found it?

"We are taking care of it and doing necessary steps from our end [sic]. Please safely discard this card at your end safely. We really appreciate you by reaching us today and providing all the details."

I was not convinced. What were the necessary steps? Yes, blocking that card so that nobody misuses it, even though the person most likely to misuse it at that moment was me. Will the person be informed?

I wrote that I need to be assured, else I would have to deposit the card at a police station.

I knew I would not do that, because, you know what happened to that phone with a cracked screen.

The "live agent" said he understood my concern, and asked me to be "rest assured", and appreciating me for reaching out again.

I assumed that necessary steps would be taken. There was no way to contact this person. I had to assume trust in the "live agent". I had to assume that the person who lost their card would be assured too, with a ping on their phone app. I had to assume a best-case scenario because someone's lost card was in my hand and I did not steal it. I had to assume that these digital cashless systems functioned smoothly.

How does one discard a bank card safely? From the time my bag was stolen on a night bus that contained all my bank cards (this was from an era when a PIN was always necessary before making any purchase at any shop), I did not appreciate this sense of transaction being complete with the swipe of the card. It was too dangerous. An app connected to the phone may not function exactly when you need it to block that stolen card. The app of the bank would not always send a notification with a ping for every transaction. Surely, there is no such option for 2 of my banks whose cards I carry. 

Banks go on about assuming that thefts won't take place, and yet design online and digital systems in ways of such protection that one mistaken digit in the PIN and you're stuck. 

Ever since I watched with fascination how Hannah Fry on BBC took apart a bank card with acid and detangled that thin wire that enables wire transactions, I cannot figure a way to discard any bank card safely. So I did what I thought would be best: break the card into several pieces, discard some of those pieces among the veggie waste, and the rest in a trash can near the bus stop.

Someday, if my pocket has a hole while my mind is on an endless scroll, and my bank card slips out, and my phone stuck at home before I had stepped out, and I have missed the last bus home, and it's raining, and not in sight a single awning, I hope my bank card is picked—and discarded—with care.