The People v Alfa Bank (Russia)

[Originally published in Russian as “Путь лжи Альфа-банка” here ] And finally, the long-awaited follow-up to my last post , announced by me as far back as in my progress report 1 , “Seek, and ye shall find” ). The subject to be covered here is the childish, easily disproved lie which Alfa Bank resorted to in its response to the CB's enquiry regarding my matter and which shows that Alfa Bank has something to hide. What I mean here is this. Given my prompt follow-up on the fraud committed against me and my appeals to the authorities, Alfa Bank was forced to come up with an excuse for its omission to act in this matter. Initially, Alfa Bank claimed in its communications to me (by telephone and at the bank's branch) that it has no mechanisms in place to delay the withdrawal of the stolen money from the accounts of the beneficiaries of instant payments through the Fast Payment System (FPS) pending a determination on the validity of the transactions involved. Specifically, in a call...

  Fast Payment System of the Bank of Russia #AlfaBankFraud Originally published in Russian as “СБП ЦБ РФ—выбор мошенников” here . This is the next instalment in my series of posts about fraud at Alfa Bank. My previous one in this series is here . Initially I wanted to call this post something like “The Bank of Russia's Fast Payment System: fraudsters' dream come true” because before it went online they had to steal money in chunks up to RUR15k through anonymous accounts with online banks, and the FPS has presumably raised this limit to RUR100k, and possibly has removed it altogether. In my case, the swindlers would have had to talk me into making 12 transfers in order to debit my Alfa Bank account to the tune of RUR176k, and this was hardly doable for them for a number of reasons. But on second thoughts I decided that I did not yet have sufficient reason to describe the FPS as fraudsters' dream come true, and I came up with another title, one that is strictly true. Le...

  1. Drawing on the facts, assumptions and guesswork presented in my last but one post , I wrote and filed a report with the Procurator General of the Russian Federation about a suspected collusion at Alfa Bank.  2. I have received final official responses to my submissions to the highest public authorities (the Presidential Executive Office and the CB of the RF). The overall result is exactly what was predicted on the banki.ru forum in this topic . The CB rejected my complaint without looking into it, and the Office passed my letter to the President on to the CB to be examined on the merits, and then simply wrote that it finds that everything was above board and that “unresolved disputes between banks and their customers are to be adjudicated pursuant to the laws of the Russian Federation”. Which is what I more or less expected.   Yet here, too, a “wonderful discovery” ["oh, how many wonderful discoveries the spirit of enlightenment has in store for us!" from Eu...

  This post is a tribute and homage to Alex Cher , who was the first to use the hashtag #AlfaBankFraud, chosen by me for this project and all other publications on the topic elsewhere, and who in his post as far back as 2017 ( the only one so hashtagged until I took up the torch) gave voice to his suspicions about shady dealings at Alfa Bank.   In compliance with his request to spread the word, I reproduce his post here.   His post was untitled, and I used a quote from it [“В Альфа-Банке завелись крысы!”, literally “Rats have appeared at Alfa Bank”] as a title for mine. 20 July 2017 ·          ❗ ️ ❗ ️ ❗ ️Important ❗ ️ ❗ ️ ❗ ️I urge all Alfa Bank cardholders to see in their online banking environments what number is used for transaction authentication texts. There are numerous instances where numbers were replaced with fake ones at the bank's offices. 📵 In other words, th...

  #AlfaBankFraud [Originally published in Russian as "Альфа-банк в сговоре с мошенниками?" here ] This is the next instalment in my series of posts about the bank fraud I fell victim to. My last post is here .   As I already reported, on 30 June 2020 I got a call on my mobile, whose number is linked to my Alfa Bank account. The caller addressed me by my first name and patronymic, having introduced himself as a member of Alfa Bank's Financial Monitoring Department, and asked me whether I had made a transfer of 1200-plus roubles to a certain person (whom he named but whose name I don't recall). I naturally said no because I don't make transfers to anybody other than my wife. Then he told me this meant that my account was compromised and invited me to undergo an ID verification procedure using the number of my Alfa bank account contract or the number of my “plastic product”, ending in 5413, in order to install “two-factor protection” for my accounts. Everythin...