The Bank of Russia defined criteria that will enable banks to identify cards and electronic wallets used by illicit enterprises. The regulator regards cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as illegal online casinos, financial pyramids and illegal forex dealers, as within scope.
The central bank’s recommendations relate to transfers between individuals. Banks should analyse operations and promptly identify suspicious transactions. A client may be deemed suspicious if, during monitoring, their transactions match two or more of the following indicators:
- a large number of individual counterparties (payors or recipients) — for example, more than 10 per day, more than 50 per month;
- a large number of credit or debit operations of non-cash funds conducted with individuals — for example, more than 30 operations per day;
- significant volumes of transfers of non-cash funds, performed between individuals — for example, more than 100,000 rubles per day, more than 1 million rubles per month;
- short time window (one minute or less) between crediting and debiting funds;
- within 12 hours (and more) of a single day there are operations to credit and (or) debit funds;
- over a week, the average end-of-day balance on the bank account does not exceed 10% of the average daily volume of operations on the account in the given period;
- debit operations are characterized by the absence of payments in favour of legal entities or individual entrepreneurs to meet the living needs of the individual — for example, payment of utilities, other goods and works;
- match in device identification information (e.g., MAC address, device fingerprint) used by different individual clients to access remote transfer services.
If these criteria are met, banks are advised to pay heightened attention to the individual’s transactions, block operations in case of suspected money laundering, and even terminate the bank account contract.
The Bank asserts that shadow economy participants receive payments from citizens and make reverse payments not from their own settlement accounts, but from “under their control bank cards and electronic wallets, often issued to fictitious individuals.” The new recommendations are expected to help in combatting this.
Earlier the Bank of Russia urged exchanges not to allow crypto-linked instruments to trade.
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