banks should share losses from fraudsters with clients – Kommersant

Banks should be held financially responsible for stealing money from a customer’s account. This will motivate credit institutions to more effectively take measures to prevent fraud, said Ivan Chebeskov, director of the financial policy department of the Ministry of Finance, at the “Territory of Financial Security” conference.

According to him, now the deceived bank client is dealing with his problem himself by going to court. “The statistics are very deplorable, about 5%, in my opinion, who actually manage to prove that a citizen can return money,” said Ivan Chebeskov.

According to statistics Central Bank, in the second quarter of 2023, attackers stole 3.6 billion rubles from the accounts of Russians. The share of funds returned to clients was only 4.5% – about 163 million rubles. Almost half of the stolen money (46.5%) was obtained by scammers using social engineering. Being under psychological influence, the victim himself provides all the information necessary to write off funds, thereby violating the banking service agreement.

“In most cases, the citizen did this himself, they also tell him that you violated the terms of the contract, in general, you must answer for everything yourself. It seems to me that such a position in the current conditions is wrong,” emphasized Ivan Chebeskov. Sharing customers’ financial losses would be socially fair and give banks an incentive to be more proactive in fighting fraud.

According to Mr. Chebeskov, if banks are obliged to pay half of the money lost by the client, then the bank security services will devote their forces to fighting fraudsters. “In essence, money will be stolen directly from banks. This issue needs to be worked out,” summed up the head of the department.

It is noted that difficulties in investigating such crimes arise, among other things, due to the slow response of credit institutions to police requests. The response time to a request is up to 30 days, which hinders the implementation of urgent operational investigative and procedural measures. On October 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on information interaction between the Central Bank and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The common base of the two departments will make it possible to reduce the time it takes to consider complaints and use information about fraudulent transactions in their work.

On July 24, Vladimir Putin signed a law that obliges banks to return stolen money to a client if the bank allowed the funds to be transferred to a fraudulent account located in the Central Bank database. The law will come into force in July 2024 due to the need to improve the technical systems of banks and departments.

Read more about the methods of psychological influence of scammers in the material “It’s easier to deceive those who are overly confident.”.

Alexandra Goroshilova