Banks to tighten oversight of Russians’ transfers under crypto-regulation roadmap

As part of the government’s roadmap for regulating the cryptocurrency industry, Russian banks will step up scrutiny of clients’ money transfers by the end of November. This was reported by Izvestia.

In September last year, the Bank of Russia issued recommendations on identifying by banks suspicious transactions by individuals. According to them, such transactions included those related to online casinos, forex dealers, financial pyramids, and crypto exchangers.

The central bank recommended identifying accounts where operations are conducted with an “unusually large number” of citizens or for amounts above 100,000 rubles per day and more than 1,000,000 rubles per month.

If the transactions appear suspicious to the bank, it may, among other measures, block the account.

These recommendations are reflected in the government’s roadmap. It provides for the mandatory implementation of the central bank’s proposals within banks’ units. The authorities responsible will be the Bank of Russia, the Ministry of Finance and Rosfinmonitoring.

As the Bank of Russia stated, banks are already applying the recommendations:

“The work conducted by the Bank of Russia and credit institutions does not entail total control over individuals’ transactions and is aimed at identifying certain risk zones associated with the use of illegal financial-service entities for settlements with Russian citizens.”

Earlier in September, the Bank of Russia also proposed to slow payments to cryptocurrency exchanges and exchangers.

In December, it emerged that the central bank would collect anonymised customer data where there is a risk that banking platforms are used for illegal transactions by bitcoin exchangers, online casinos and bookmakers. In January the regulator requested banks for information on such operations.

Later, the Bank of Russia issued a report in which it urged banning the circulation of cryptocurrencies and mining within Russia.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko approved a roadmap for regulating the cryptocurrency market through to the end of 2022.

Follow ForkLog’s bitcoin-news on our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, prices and analytics.