During the pandemic, illegal lenders have changed the scheme of working with potential borrowers. They began to accept applications for loans by phone and go to clients themselves, said Valery Lyakh, head of the department for combating unfair practices of the Central Bank.
Last year, black lenders stopped publishing ads on websites and offline, and they do not have offices either. They began to work in a new way: to attract bloggers to the promotion and post information on social networks. Fraudsters themselves come to a person, conclude an agreement with him and give out money. In 2020, the Central Bank identified 821 organizations that were engaged in illegal lending. About 10 percent of them worked “on call”.
In total, the Bank of Russia detected more than 1.5 thousand organizations with signs of illegal activity (42.3 percent less than a year earlier). However, the number of illegal forex dealers rose sharply over the year – by 88 percent. The Central Bank also announced the emergence of a new organization with signs of a financial pyramid – the Medpharm cooperative. He attracts money from citizens at a high interest rate, promising to invest it in the purchase of medicines.
Earlier it became known about a new trick of scammers. They place advertisements on social networks in which they offer to receive a “payment” on behalf of the Central Bank, which is supposedly due to every Russian citizen as support during the coronavirus epidemic.