The Central Bank revealed in 2022 twice as many pyramid schemes as in 2021 – about two thousand

The Central Bank in 2022 identified about 5 thousand companies in Russia with signs of illegal activity against 2.7 thousand a year earlier. About 2,000 of them are pyramid schemes, said Valery Lyakh, director of the Central Bank’s department for combating unfair practices. In 2021, 2.3 times fewer pyramids were discovered.

Other illegal companies include 1.2 thousand professional participants and 1.7 thousand black creditors. Their number increased by 1.4 and 1.8 times, respectively. “On the one hand, such a surge is the reverse side of the rapid development of technologies … At the same time, our statistics still show the number of identified cases or projects, and not companies as such,” said Mr. Lyakh “RIA News”.

The Director of the Department of the Central Bank noted that the Bank of Russia has learned to “quite quickly” to find illegal schemes. Information about them is published on the website and transferred to law enforcement agencies. Internet resources with these schemes are blocked. According to Mr. Lyakh, when the scammers realize that they have “lit up”, they abandon the project and open a new one. Often they also open several small parallel projects, which affects the statistics.

Almost 96% of the pyramid schemes identified in Russia operated on the Internet. The same applies to 97% of illegal professional participants and 43% of illegal creditors. Almost half of the pyramids attracted payments in cryptocurrencies. “Such popularity of the crypt is due, among other things, to the fact that last year there were fewer foreign services that were used for payments abroad,” says Mr. Lyakh.

In early December, the Bank of Russia for the first time identified three illegal operators of investment platforms. Fan.Money, the financial group Expert, which unites nine services, and the investment platform 1STARTER were blacklisted.

More details – in the material “Kommersant” “Platform Disgrace”.

Leonid Uvarchev