Almost 5,000 illegal companies and financial pyramids identified in 2022
Last year, the number of such organisations revealed by the Bank of Russia increased by 85%. 2,000 pyramids (2.3 times more than in 2021), 1,200 illegal professional securities market participants, and 1,700 rogue creditors (1.4 and 1.8 times more than in 2021, respectively) were identified in 2022.
Almost all the pyramids and illegal professional market participants, as well as 43% of rogue creditors, operated on the Internet. Notably, the organisers of illegal schemes prefer to use messengers exclusively rather than to create their own websites.
Scammers still used cryptocurrencies to deceive people: almost 50% of such identified pyramids accepted payments in cryptocurrencies and forex fraudsters promised their customers access to the cryptocurrency market.
‘The increase in the number of identified illegal lenders is primarily due the fact that we have improved our monitoring system, which allows us to detect scams and scammers at an early stage. We publish information about them on the Bank of Russia website and warn people that interaction with fraudsters is extremely risky. The existing technologies give them the opportunity to create new similar schemes quickly and without a large investment,' says Valeriy Lyakh, Director of the Bank of Russia's Department for Countering Misconduct.
The regulator forwards information about illegal companies operating in the financial market to the law enforcement agencies. In 2022, based on materials received from the Bank of Russia, over 100 criminal cases were opened, and at its initiative, almost 9,000 websites and social media pages used by fraudsters and pyramids were blocked.