Historical hacking – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) dated 03/09/2023

Recently, the Bank of Russia announced that it had issued a decision to bring MTS Bank to administrative responsibility under Article 14.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation. It covers illegal, but not under the Criminal Code, actions to obtain or provide a credit report or information that constitutes a credit history. This is the seventh such violation of MTS Bank since the beginning of this year, but it is not a record holder: Alfa-Bank, for example, received 12 resolutions on the same basis in a little over two months in 2023.

Violation of Article 14.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation provides for punishment, but rather conditional: for officials – from 2.5 thousand to 5 thousand rubles, for legal entities – from 30 thousand to 50 thousand rubles. Officials may also be subject to disqualification for up to three years.

As a result, individual creditors simply neglect possible punishment. From the analysis of the data of the Bank of Russia, it follows that in total, banks and MFOs (the latter to a much lesser extent) have received 45 such resolutions from the regulator since the beginning of the year, a year earlier the figure was more modest – 39 pieces. Then the indisputable violator was the bank “FC Otkritie” (at that time it belonged to the Central Bank; 17 resolutions). However, even now he quite often goes against the rules. And in general, the violators are mostly repeated – Otkritie, Alfa-Bank, Tinkoff-Bank, MTS-Bank, Raiffeisenbank and a couple of MFIs.

The number of rulings on unauthorized access to credit histories in 2021 and 2022 are comparable – about 150 per year. And this is only what comes in the form of citizens’ complaints to the Central Bank and is considered by the regulator.

On the one hand, you can understand the banks: the solvency of the population is falling, incomes are unstable, the debt load is growing like a snowball – and how not to make sure. On the other hand, citizens who used to fall for supposedly pre-approved offers more have become smarter, and it becomes more difficult to get them to come to a bank office or meet with a courier for the dubious pleasure of getting a loan denied.

It would seem that progress, which created a surge in complaints about unauthorized requests for credit histories, namely, citizens’ access to them through the State Services, should have solved the problem. After all, now on the Gosuslugi portal, it is enough for the borrower to give the lender consent to access the credit history online, and the problem is settled.

But some creditors, apparently, find it easier or more accustomed to run huge amounts of data through the CBI databases, hoping that complaints will not reach the Central Bank, than to take advantage of new legal opportunities. And until the Central Bank makes the punishment for repeat offenders unbearable, the situation does not seem to change.