Russian financial watchdog proposes expanding its powers to suspend suspicious transactions

MOSCOW. Aug 9 (Interfax) - Russia's Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) wants to have the power to temporarily suspend transactions that are suspicious in terms of money laundering, the watchdog's deputy head, German Neglyad said in an interview with Interfax.

The service now has this power when it comes to fighting terrorism and extremism. The head of the watchdog, Yury Chikhanchin said in July that giving his agency the power to quickly stop financial transactions would also help combat bank drops, where individuals, in exchange for payment, provide their banking details for use in unlawful transactions.

"This not only referred to drops, but the possibility of granting the right to temporarily, perhaps for a few days, suspend, at our discretion, generally suspicious transactions in terms of money laundering. But this is only a proposal at this point, it will be discussed yet. Its details are at the stage of being worked out," Neglyad said.

He said this could help protect the assets of potential fraud victims. "A widespread fraudulent scheme is when they call a person from some government agency, including from the Federal Financial Monitoring Service. And the individual decides to make sure, writes us - 'is this really you?' Of course, we try to quickly contact the party, explain that this is fraud, and this works, people avoid losses," Neglyad said.

"But this is manual control, one could say, and we don't have that many employees. If it was possible to do this through analysis of transactions, including with the use of AI methods and various databases that we have at our disposal, it could be more effective," Neglyad said.