The Central Bank warned about fraudulent schemes to unlock investors’ assets

The Bank of Russia has warned about the massive spread of advertisements on the Internet in which scammers offer citizens to return their assets blocked by foreign accounting institutions. This was reported by press service Central Bank.

The regulator clarified that scammers’ advertisements are distributed, in particular, on social networks, instant messengers, and are also sent to email addresses. As the Central Bank explains, scammers usually ask the investor to transfer to the account of a company providing such services an amount equal to the value of the blocked assets. Citizens are promised that the money will be returned to their bank account in double amount, explains the Bank of Russia.

The Central Bank emphasized that scammers can pose as a financial organization, but not have a license from the Bank of Russia. The regulator recalled that it enters information about illegal companies whose websites are subject to blocking into a specialized registry.

The Central Bank recommended that investors be careful, check the legality of the organization on the Central Bank website, and also not transfer money to unverified companies and not provide them with personal data.

In June 2022, the volume of foreign securities of Russian investors blocked in the accounts of the National Settlement Depository (NSD) in European depositories was estimated by the First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank, Vladimir Chistyukhin, at the equivalent of 6 trillion rubles. ($100 billion). Thanks to the issuance of replacement bonds by Russian issuers, about $28.7 billion was released by the end of 2023.

The situation with shares and depositary receipts, primarily of foreign issuers, turned out to be more complicated. But it also moved forward by the end of 2023 through two mechanisms – private, by contacting foreign regulators, and a unified state exchange. In December 2023, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov estimated the number of retail investors with blocked assets at 3.6 million people. The situation became more complicated due to the inclusion of the St. Petersburg Exchange on the US SDN list in November. According to her assessmentas a result of new sanctions, investor assets worth $3 billion were additionally frozen.

On progress in unlocking Russian assets in 2023 – in the material “The end of the era of carpet blocking”.

Erdni Kagaltynov