The State Duma submitted bills on blocking accounts to combat scammers
The Government of the Russian Federation is ready to endow the investigation and inquiry bodies with the right without a court decision to block money in the accounts of citizens in case of suspicious that they were stolen. At the same time, funds can be blocked for no more than ten days and only the amount that was stolen, and not the whole account. The promptness is a key factor in the fight against scammers, experts agree. But this measure may not be enough, since while the bank fulfills the requirement of the investigation, attackers can have time to get out money.
The government introduced two bills with amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CPC) and the Law on Banks and Banking Activities at the end of last week. The changes contained in them will allow law enforcement agencies to demand blocking from the bank in the account of the stolen funds without a court decision.
There are two reservations in the documents: funds can be blocked for no more than ten days and only the amount that was stolen, and not the whole account.
The explanatory note says that the bill was “developed in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of counteracting crimes related to the theft and withdrawal of funds using information and telecommunication technologies”.
“Kommersant” sent a request to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.
Over the past six years, the amount of funds stolen using information and telecommunication technologies has increased four times from the explanatory note. Now every third crime is committed in a digital environment, more than 80% of them falls on distance theft. According to the apparatus of the Government of the Russian Federation, in 2024 more than 485 thousand crimes related to remote funds from citizens of funds were registered, the amount of damage for which amounted to more than 197.5 billion rubles.
Earlier, with a similar initiative at the annual collegium of the Investigative Committee of Russia (TFR), its chairman Alexander Bastrykin made it (See “Kommersant” from February 5). He said that the Ministry of Internal Affairs proposed supplementing the Code of Criminal Procedure with the relevant norm “for the production of the necessary investigative actions”, the TFR supported this proposal.
Now, according to Mr. Bastrykin, for this, the investigator must achieve the arrest of such assets in the court. “The investigation does not have a tool today with the help of which you can adequately respond to the changed situation, and the designed norm can become a means that will significantly accelerate the reaction of law enforcement to attempts to theft of funds,” says Igor Lebedev, head of the Department of Economic Security and Risk of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. However, in his opinion, in this case, control over the actions of investigators should be clearly prescribed, and he is in the published document. “In fact, we have no other way out, we need to change the approach to responding to the actions of scammers in order to accelerate it as much as possible, and if for this it is necessary to limit the rights of the minority in some way to observe the rights of the majority,” says Igor Lebedev.
“It is important to note that the blocking of operations is possible only by the investigator with the consent of the head of the investigating authority or interrogator with the consent of the prosecutor in cases that are not upset,” the head of the government of the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Grigorenko indicates. “During this period, a petition should be sent to impose the arrest on this property or the decision to cancel the decision on suspension of operations.” According to him, the designed provisions will not lead to the disclosure of information about the banking secret of an indefinite circle of persons and limit the arbitrary application of the coercive measure in question, since its implementation is possible only for an already initiated criminal case (that is, when committing a specific crime), as well as in order to apply arrest on property, which involves subsequent judicial control.
According to the MVA-Professor of the Digital Finance of the Presidential Academy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexei Volukov, the text of the explanatory note to the bill says that the accounts that go through the stolen money “live” for two weeks, and the law says that document management should be electronic, if possible.
“According to our estimates, if you block a suspicious account within three hours, this increases the amount of funds returned by 30%, and an increase in this period at times reduces the likelihood of a refund,” concludes Alexei Voilukov.
In turn, the head of the National Council of the Financial Market, Andrei Emelin, notes that the blocking of funds proposed in the bill will give time to the investigation to impose a procedural arrest for stolen money. “The procedures stipulated today in the Code of Criminal Procedure do not make it possible to quickly respond to theft of funds in modern conditions,” he notes. “Actually, the new option, although the most operational of the procedurally possible, will be as effective as possible in the case of even more operational measures on the side of the banks in order to effectively fight scammers.” Therefore, today another block of norms is actively discussed, according to which the bank of the recipient of suspicious funds will freeze them at the signal of the sender bank immediately upon receipt of the application for transfer without consent, continues Mr. Emelin.
