The Central Bank launched a robot to search for earnings schemes on the Internet

The Bank of Russia began to use a special robot to search the Internet for illegal financial organizations, including those with signs of financial pyramids, Prime reports with reference to the director of the Central Bank’s Department for Countering Unfair Practices Valery Lyakh.

The robot simulates the behavior of a real person: he wanders through the Internet and is looking for where to invest money. Companies that are looking for new customers react to this visitor. The bot can answer the most primitive questions in interactive chat rooms. The robot finds are analyzed by CB specialists.

Companies with signs of a financial pyramid like “Cashbury” are investigated, then domains are separated, and mobile applications are deleted from directories. For example, Google, at the request of the Central Bank, has already deleted two such applications from Google Play. A similar letter of cooperation sent to Apple.

Splitting the domain of the financial pyramid is not at all easy, it is a long procedure:

First, we need to stop the work of such sites to contact the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor's office is working on the appeal and, following the results of its consideration, sends the claim to the court. Then the court in the case of a positive decision sends it to Roskomnadzor, which should block the resource.

And in fact for all this time - 4-6 months at best - the organizers of the financial pyramids have time to remove all the cream and say goodbye to their flock. After all, site owners also know about the claim. And they can always decide on the transfer of activity to other sites. Moreover, it is enough for the organizers of financial pyramids to simply transfer traffic from one site to another, without even changing the pictures, without changing the legends - just attract people to the new site or even organize the placement of these sites outside the Russian domains of the RU, RF, SU…

The bill on possible extrajudicial blocking of sites of financial pyramids, which is now being considered in the State Duma, should increase the speed of blocking several times.

The story of “Cashbury” is not over yet, says Vladimir Lyakh: “Unfortunately, smaller fragments, as a rule, appear on the wreckage of a large financial pyramid. As followers who offer some kind of new pseudo-investment idea, so fraudsters try to make money on the previous scheme. They promise to return your money allegedly for quite a modest amount, to organize a lawsuit with a guarantee of the return of your investment in the pyramid and come up with other tricks. Their principle - why not profit, if so far there is such an opportunity. "

During the period from 2015 to 2018, more than 685 organizations and Internet projects with signs of a financial pyramid were identified: in 2015 - 200 such organizations, in 2016 - 180, in 2017 - 137, in 2018 - 168. Most pyramids are created in the form of LLC and consumer cooperatives.

Vladimir Lyakh explained how the Cashbury site managed to gain such popularity: “The avalanche interest was created both by actively posting information with coordinated groups in social networks and by creating the company's image through advertising, including by fairly well-known media people. The creators of these pyramids usually use social engineering to engage people. The principle is the same: it is necessary to inspire people that the company is rapidly growing, allegedly due to some kind of supernova, super-modern idea, about which no one else knows, but it brings an all-time high yield. ”

In addition to financial pyramids, the Central Bank is fighting illegal forex traders. So, on December 27, the Central Bank revoked the licenses of five forex dealers: Forex Club LLC, Fix Trade LLC, Trastforex LLC, Teletrade Group LLC, Alpari Forex LLC. In all cases, repeated violations of the law are cited as the cause. Last year, the Central Bank uncovered 223 sites of illegal forex dealers.