Central Bank of Russia will work individually with certain banks to improve quality of fraud reporting

MOSCOW. Feb 19 (Interfax) - Banks correctly report fraudulent transactions in 85% of cases, and to further improve reporting quality, the Central Bank of Russia will work individually with certain credit institutions which are lagging behind, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said at the Cybersecurity in Finance forum.

"We see that the quality of bank reporting has improved. In our assessment, banks now fully and correctly report 85% cases of fraud and attempted theft across the banking system. A year ago, this figure was significantly lower. That was an absolutely unacceptable situation," Nabiullina said.

Many banks previously downplayed the actual level of cyber fraud, she said. For example, the Central Bank discovered that one major bank systematically failed to register unauthorized transactions and did not report cases of defrauded clients to the database, arguing that although the person had been deceived, they had still transferred the money themselves. As a result, the regulator had to take supervisory measures, and some banks faced penalties.

"But we must acknowledge that 85% is not 100%, so we will continue to work individually to improve data quality at underperforming banks," she said.

According to the Central Bank, the volume of unauthorized transactions in 2024 amounted to 27.5 billion rubles, up 1.74-fold compared to 2023 (15.8 billion rubles). Last year, banks refunded 9.9% of all fraudulent transactions to clients (2.7 billion rubles), compared to 8.7% (1.4 billion rubles) in 2023.