Bank of Russia recommends blocking cards, wallets used for crypto exchanges

The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has lumped crypto exchangers with illegal forex dealers and financial pyramids among those doing shady businesses in advising commercial banks on how to identify and block their cards and wallet accounts.

The CBR has been opposing the legalization of cryptocurrencies and related activities.

Russian banks need to analyze and identify suspicious transactions in their anti-money laundering (AML) efforts and terminate services.

Among the cause of concern for the CBR were deposits and withdrawals reaching 30 a day and numerous individual payers or recipients of over 10 per day or 50 per month.

The same applies to frequent transactions when the total amounts to at least 100,000 Russian rubles daily or 1 million rubles a month, and intervals of less than a minute between deposits and withdrawals.

The bank emphasized that transactions between private persons often involved accounts registered under false names to make and receive payments.

The CBR advised commercial banks to investigate where the average remaining balance at the end of each day does not exceed 10 percent of the average daily transaction volume in a week.

Accounts that are not used to cover utility bills or pay for goods and services can be blacklisted as well.

A bank client may be deemed suspicious if their transactions fall under two or more of the described criteria.

To identify suspicious clients, the CBR instructed banks to track digital fingerprints left by account holders including identifying devices used to access and transfer the funds remotely.