The Bank of Russia, in collaboration with Rosfinmonitoring, is developing a platform to monitor suspicious transactions by individuals and facilitate the exchange of this information among credit institutions. This was revealed to RBC by Bogdan Shablya, head of the Central Bank’s Financial Monitoring and Currency Control Service.
The initiative aims to combat the use of drop accounts, which are used for illicit transactions.
“Their clients include major online casinos whose websites are blocked, as well as Russian and foreign crypto exchanges, pirate sites, and drug shops,” explained Shablya.
According to him, around 10 million Russians have recently made transfers to dropper accounts:
“These are generally not criminals, but ordinary people—some are placing bets in online casinos, others are buying cryptocurrency. However, the level of involvement is significant.”
Currently, the Central Bank has information on approximately 700,000 drop accounts involved in dubious transactions.
The new platform will enable banks to coordinate efforts to block such clients’ activities and prevent the opening of new accounts. Being listed in the drop account database could also lead to information being passed to law enforcement agencies.
The exact timeline for the development of this solution has not been disclosed.
Since September 2021, the Central Bank of Russia has classified transactions with crypto exchanges as suspicious and requires banks to monitor them closely. If money laundering is suspected, financial institutions may block a client’s transactions and even terminate the contract.
In 2024, the regulator reduced the banking sector’s involvement in high-risk P2P transactions by 2.8 times compared to the previous year.