Draw your client – Newspaper Kommersant No. 241 (7442) dated 12/27/2022
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The number of proposals for drawing documents for passing the “know your customer” (KYC) procedure at financial institutions has significantly increased on the dark web. The cost of such services is estimated at a maximum of several hundred dollars. Their demand will grow, including against the backdrop of an increase in the interest of CIS banks in attracting Russian clients, experts say.
“Kommersant” drew attention to the growth of requests and offers on the dark web of services for rendering documents for passing KYC procedures in financial institutions. According to Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence, the frequency of mentions of the KYC procedure in ads both on Russian and foreign resources in 2021 was about 200 messages per month, and in 2022 it increased to 500 messages. There were many proposals before, but at that time there were no international sanctions and no demand for services to bypass them, explains Ashot Hovhannisyan, founder of the DLBI data leak intelligence and darknet monitoring service.
At the same time, experts argue that there have been no significant changes either in the number of services providing services for “drawing” documents in general, or in the number of announcements about them. According to Peter Mareichev, an analyst at Kaspersky Threat Intelligence, both in the past and this year, the average monthly number of messages offering such services was about 2,000. Fedor Muzalevsky, director of the technical department at RTM Group, clarifies that this year the number is tens of thousands of cases. .
At the same time, as Group-IB explained, a year ago “there was an increased demand for rendering covid certificates, and recently most orders have been caused by both a mass departure (and the need to restore or produce local documents) and entry (re-registration) into crypto projects and passing KYC procedures.
The ads that Kommersant got acquainted with offer drawing scans of documents (passports, rights, utility bills, bank statements, etc.) for the requested data, photomontage (a photo with a document in the face, a document against the background, a document in hand and etc.), color printing and lamination for photos, live drops (dummy people) for photo and video verification with documents (printed dummy).
Security experts note that the cost of a service directly depends on its quality. According to Fyodor Muzalevsky, high-quality fakes can cost the customer “several hundred dollars”, although “thousands of dollars are not yet in question.” As Mr. Hovhannisyan notes, “a live drop with documents costs the most.”
According to Petr Mareichev, the demand for documents for KYC verification is one way or another connected with the growing interest in foreign exchange services and online financial services. Often these are bookmakers, crypto-exchanges and neo-banks that conduct mainly online KYC, Mr. Hovhannisyan points out. Also, according to him, such packages can be used to open ordinary bank accounts and cards in some banks of the CIS countries, as they “simplify KYC procedures and take them online in order to earn on Russians who are left without access to the global financial system.”
In the case of Russian jurisdiction, in the cases described, signs of Art. 327 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (forgery, production or circulation of forged documents, state awards, stamps, seals or letterheads), says Irina Shcherbakova, lawyer, partner at Kazakov and Partners. However, if we are talking about a photograph with a passport, a fake (drawing) of a scanned copy of a passport, the issue of criminal liability becomes moot and currently requires additional settlement, the lawyer clarifies.
Sites in case of detection of a fake, as a rule, refuse to provide a person with a particular service. They can apply to law enforcement agencies, but they do this extremely rarely and only in cases where such actions entail additional illegal consequences, Ms. Shcherbakova points out.
Abroad, the consequences can be more serious. As Elena Mende, lawyer of the Baltic Bar Association named after Anatoly Sobchak, notes, the measures taken by the sites depend on their compliance policy, but in practice, if fraud is suspected, the site will immediately block the account and request additional documents, and if they do not suit it, they will contact law enforcement agencies .
Moreover, according to Fedor Muzalevsky, developed platforms such as crypto-exchanges and other financial services with a stable reputation have mechanisms to detect a fake passport scan. “Given that remote identification is often used in cases where a person does not live at the place of registration of the financial platform, this complicates verification and criminal prosecution, usually limited to blocking the account,” Ms. Mende explains. However, according to her, there were cases when US financial companies brought such cases “to the deprivation of visas of people who submitted fake documents.”
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