Russians may begin to be warned about a loan taken by fraudsters through the State Services

Law on auto-informing submitted to the lower house of parliament

A draft law has been submitted to the State Duma on automatically informing citizens about a loan or microloan issued in their name. If the initiative is supported, then banks and MFIs will be required to notify the borrower of the conclusion of a loan agreement in his name through the State Services portal. This measure should protect a person from scammers who managed to get hold of personal data and issue a loan in his name, embezzling the money received and putting an unsuspecting citizen in front of the need to pay for it.

Ruslan M., who works as a sports journalist on one of the TV channels, unexpectedly received a letter from the court in December 2022 to recover a debt on a loan that he allegedly took in early March 2021. From the document it followed that the amount of 35 thousand rubles at interest was given to him by one of the MFIs in Novosibirsk. The man’s surprise knew no bounds, since he did not need money, he himself had never applied to the IFO, he had never been to Novosibirsk in his life, and at the beginning of March 2021 he was completely abroad, where he covered the competition. He told his colleagues and subscribers on social networks about his misadventures, and also wrote a statement to the police. During the investigation, it turned out that a few years ago a bookmaker concluded an agreement with the man to advertise its services, whose servers were then hacked by hackers and stole the personal data of all customers and partners, including Ruslan’s passport data. After that, the scammers simply started taking loans for them from digital MFIs, and indeed, wherever possible. As a result, the man became a malicious debtor on a loan that he did not even know about.

It is precisely such poor fellows as Ruslan that the new bill is intended to help. According to its authors, about 7 million Russians, when checking their credit history, found loans taken in their name by crooks. Today, banks and MFIs are required to report loans “only for show”, as a result, fraud is rampant in the market. Scammers often steal the passport itself or its data on the Internet, and apply for loans in places where they issue them online, without the personal participation of the borrower. It is this practice that the proposed bill will have to do, as its authors hope.

However, questions about this initiative arose already at the level of the analysis of figures. “The Central Bank reports about 1 million detected transactions without the consent of the client annually in the amount of 13–14 billion a year,” says Valery Yemelyanov, an expert on the stock market at BCS Mir Investments. – About a quarter of them are fraud, but there are not only loans. In total, 2-4% of all loans may have signs of fraud.”

Some experts generally called the proposal of the deputies “an attempt to promote”, pointing out that the proposed measure would not cause serious damage to the fraudulent business. As the head of the analytical department of BKF-Bank, Maxim Osadchiy, pointed out, there are no statistics on the issuance of loans by MFIs based on stolen personal data. But the volume of such transactions can be judged by the statistics of the volume of transactions without the consent of an individual client (13.4 billion rubles in 2022). It can be assumed that the volume of interest to us is no more than 10% of the indicated value and, therefore, does not exceed 1.3 billion rubles. The main volume of fraudulent transactions falls on remote banking channels and on payment for goods and services on the Internet.

“Some kind of completely far-fetched problem,” the head of InDeFi Smart Bank Sergey Mendeleev continues the conversation. — I don’t understand where the figure of 7 million fake loans comes from. It’s overpriced by at least an order of magnitude. Neither the bank nor the microfinance organization is in any way interested in issuing a loan to a “toxic” borrower, since this is a net loss. It is quite clear that, having learned about this, no one will pay either the body or interest, but will turn at least to law enforcement agencies, and in case of persistence on the part of the credit institution, to the court, which will win with a probability of 99.9%.

Among the banks, the expert could not name a single financial institution that would issue loans without the knowledge of the client. There are times when a citizen’s application has been hacked and there you can really get very solid funds at the touch of a button, if your credit history allows. However, if a person has lost access to the application and missed the situation, he can also miss the notification from the State Services. “As for the bill itself, it will be neither hot nor cold: well, you will find out from the letter from the State Services that someone took out a loan for your passport, so what?” asks Mendeleev. The money has already been stolen. But if through the State Services it would be necessary to confirm consent to a loan, as Russians now confirm their SIM cards at corporate rates, then it would be effective, the expert believes and advises deputies to rewrite the initiative.