The Central Bank gave recommendations to banks to combat the “restaurant money laundering scheme”

The Bank of Russia has developed recommendations for acquiring banks and payment aggregators to strengthen control over stores and restaurants for compliance with their real and declared activities. According to the document, excerpts from which are given RBCthe regulator’s recommendations are aimed at combating the so-called “restaurant scheme”, as well as minimizing the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing.

“During the monitoring of acquiring operations of credit institutions, the Bank of Russia identified some vulnerabilities that allow this service to be used by unscrupulous market participants,” a Bank of Russia representative told RBC.

We are talking about two vulnerabilities, a representative of the regulator clarified. In particular, the Central Bank found out that a number of cafes and restaurants incorrectly use acquiring services. Organizations registered cashless payment terminals and cash register equipment to third parties and used them to accept payments from clients. This allowed them not to credit funds to their accounts, but to redirect them to the accounts of travel companies and large car dealerships to purchase cash trading proceeds from them, or transfer them to the accounts of citizens.

The second vulnerability is associated with participants in the shadow gambling business who operate under the guise of organizations providing legal services for crediting and debiting funds from citizens’ payment cards. A representative of the Bank of Russia noted that the recommendations contain explanations for banks on how to “refine their control systems in order to quickly identify such transactions.”

According to the recommendations, the Central Bank advises banks to assign MCC codes (merchant category codes, indicating the category of goods or services) to stores and service enterprises and ensure that the code corresponds to the declared activities of the company. To monitor compliance with MCC codes, acquiring banks need to periodically audit stores and restaurants. In particular, they should pay attention to the number of payments per hour, day or month, their distribution throughout the day, transaction amounts, etc.

Banks are also recommended to include company data in payment messages, including tax identification number and POS terminal ID. If money laundering is suspected, banks should conduct an in-depth review of the client’s documents. Termination of the contract is permitted.

At the end of 2022, Rosfinmonitoring together with the Federal Tax Service and the Bank of Russia revealed “restaurant” tax evasion scheme. It was then reported that money was transferred through chains of banks to car dealerships and travel agencies to purchase cash. During further inspection, it turned out that the key link in the scheme was the settlement non-bank credit organization Russian Investment Bank. Thanks to the gray acquiring scheme for restaurants, the organizers managed to earn 10 billion rubles. in year.

Read more about how the scheme worked in the Kommersant FM article. “Restaurants were diverted from taxes”.