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- Laundering funds: the damage from economic crimes has increased as much as possible since 2022
Laundering funds: the damage from economic crimes has increased as much as possible since 2022
Since the beginning of the year, the damage from economic crimes in Russia has increased by 20% and amounted to 266.2 billion rubles, which is the maximum since 2022, Izvestia found out. The increase is due to the proliferation of remote methods of committing economic offenses, as well as the more effective work of law enforcement agencies. Significant damage is caused by money laundering, the manufacture of counterfeit money and securities, forced transactions, as well as fraud against government agencies, including bribery. About how the authorities are fighting economic crimes — in the material of Izvestia.
How much damage has been caused by economic crimes
Material damage from economic crimes in the three quarters of 2025 amounted to over 266 billion rubles, which is 20% more than last year, according to the most recent data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Izvestia analyzed them). At the same time, losses under this item are the highest in the last four years — only in 2022 they were higher, reaching 283 billion rubles.
According to the report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a total of 88.7 thousand economic crimes were detected in January–September 2024. At the same time, serious and especially serious crimes accounted for 68.7% of all frauds in this area. Izvestia sent a request to the ministry.
Economic crimes include the actions of private entrepreneurs or legal entities aimed at extracting illegal income, explained the partner of the Pen Bar Association. & Paper by Alena Grishkova. In Russian statistics, they also include offenses related to the property interests of a business.
According to the chapter of the Criminal Code on economic crimes, such crimes include the legalization and laundering of income, the illegal receipt or provision of loans, the production of counterfeit money, coercion to a transaction, and manipulation of the financial market. Also, for example, they include the illegal organization of gambling and the sale of alcoholic beverages.
Tax evasion and bribery are also among such frauds. They lead to disruption of the work of state institutions, as well as to losses of budget funds.
Damage rates from economic crimes are growing, among other things, due to the more effective activities of law enforcement and tax authorities, which actively identify the practices of intruders, said Alyona Grishkova. Moreover, it is important to understand that not all offenses are included in the statistics, because the damage gets into it only after the initiation of a criminal case.
How does the development of technology affect the volume of economic crimes
Modern technologies accelerate and simplify financial transactions, but at the same time contribute to the growth of economic crimes, said Vladimir Chernov, analyst at Freedom Finance Global. This is especially evident in the field of money laundering: the development of payment technologies and the reduction of the share of cash in the economy create new opportunities for criminal activity. Dmitry Grigoryadi, an expert at the Stolypin Institute of Growth Economics, agrees with him. According to him, attackers are increasingly using the advantages of digitalization and technology development to organize shadow schemes.
The withdrawal of funds from the legal economy severely affects macroeconomics and the financial system. So, according to the Central Bank for the first half of 2025, about 8.5 billion rubles were withdrawn abroad through banks, and another 23.6 billion were cashed out as part of dubious schemes. Rosfinmonitoring also highlights the high risks in individual industries and regions.
The authorities counteract money laundering primarily through enhanced financial control, Vladimir Chernov noted. Banks and other financial organizations are required to strictly monitor all customer transactions and report suspicious transactions to the authorized authorities. When suspicious transactions are detected, government agencies may temporarily freeze or seize funds until their origin is established.
Izvestia sent a request to the Bank of Russia, in which areas the regulator is fighting economic crimes.
The problem is also getting worse due to the increase in fraud. Stolen money is often quickly withdrawn from the legal banking system into the shadow market — through cashing, fake accounts, crypto wallets or chains of fictitious transactions, said Dmitry Tselishchev, managing director of the Rikom-Trust investment company. This creates additional risks for banks: they have to identify not only classic income laundering schemes, but also rapidly changing fraudulent withdrawal methods.
As a result, the overall burden on banking financial monitoring systems is increasing dramatically. Financial organizations are forced to analyze significantly more transactions, strengthen risk assessment systems, and implement more sophisticated algorithms to track suspicious transactions. All this makes the fight against money laundering and fraud more resource-intensive and technologically challenging.
At the same time, the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, stated that the authorities had "overreached" in the fight against fraud. According to her, the number of complaints about unjustified account blocking has increased.
The trust of citizens is also undermined by crimes in the financial market, which can create serious imbalances in the system, Dmitry Tselishchev noted. Insiders — investors with access to confidential information — make super profits at the expense of less informed participants, while even one such violation can lead to multimillion-dollar losses for other players and undermine confidence in the financial system. Market manipulation, including artificial price gouging, can cause serious fluctuations in the value of assets and destabilize entire market segments.
In the coming years, the dynamics of economic crimes will depend on the balance between the development of protective mechanisms and the complication of criminal schemes, Vladimir Chernov believes. With the steady development of anti-fraud, data exchange between banks and the government, as well as the introduction of digital financial instruments, the damage can be stabilized. At the same time, the expansion of the gray zone in the economy is possible, since the methods of work of intruders will also develop.
In any case, economic crimes will remain a significant problem, the expert believes. The scale of the damage will depend on how quickly protection systems and law enforcement approaches can adapt to new challenges.
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