The path of lies of 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 with an Alfa Bank operator recorded by me 02.07.20, she said (4m50s into the recording), in response to my question as to whether anything had been done to delay withdrawals at Gazprombank, that “we can't do this; only the police can do this when you make a statement”.

However, in its response to the Bank of Russia’s enquiry in connection with my letter to the RF President, which was forwarded there by the Presidential Executive Office to be examined on the merits, Alfa Bank did not avail itself of this straightforward explanation as the reason for its failure to recredit my account, but put forward an entirely different version, which is so far off the truth that I described it as “childish, easily disproved lie” in my feedback to the Bank of Russia—it probably did not occur to anybody at AB that the CB would swallow the lie hook, line and sinker, turn around and quote it in its response to me without giving it a second thought.

Errare humanum est; we all make mistakes: I made a mistake in falling for the scam of the fraudsters; they made two mistakes, because of their greed in my opinion, in not limiting themselves to a single transfer of up to RUR100k and not returning the stolen money immediately after my call to Alfa Bank (or at the latest when “Sergey Vladimirovich” called me back the following day as promised – probably to check whether I had told anybody about the fraud, and I told him that I had and that a real investigation was in progress); and Alfa Bank itself made a mistake in failing to exercise due diligence in its arse covering.

Let's get back to nos moutons, however: specifically, according to the CB (in its response to me in connection with my letter to V.V.Putin passed on to it by the Presidential Administration, see here (in Russian), pages 2-3), “On 30.06.2020, you used the Alfa Mobile app to make two outgoing transfers of funds totalling RUR176,000.00 from your current account through the Fast Payment System to the phone numbers 796***9933 and 796***0088”. Yes, that's the way it happened all right (note, incidentally, that AB conceals the numbers of the fraudsters even from the CB); what follows, however, is something new: “… Bank [Alfa Bank] reported that Bank's employees had sent from Bank's email account (911@alfabank.ru) to your email address a transaction reversal form for you to fill in; as at 31.07.2020, however, Bank received no completed form from you for the transactions you wanted reversed”.

Now this is a barefaced lie, and a childish one to boot. Judge for yourself: how plausible is the statement that a person who promptly called the bank, went to the police station, made a statement there and collected the necessary evidence, and then lodged complaints with the authorities and published quite a few posts online on the subject did not bother filling in a form emailed to him and returning it to the bank?

This statement is untenable per se as well because Alfa Bank—just in response to my call to the bank, without any form—froze the amount of RUR223, which I paid with my card for a purchase at the corner shop the day prior (as was evident from the bank statement taken out at Alfa Bank for the police). Why on earth did it do nothing in respect of RUR176k?

But the clincher is that this lie is easily exposed by the emails between me and Alfa Bank, which are hosted on Yandex servers and which I disclosed to the public prosecutor and the police (as part of a follow-up filed through the virtual front desk of the RF Ministry of Internal Affairs to my original statement to the police in an attempt to suggest a new line of investigation into the crime in light of possible links and coordination between the fraudsters and AB).

For purposes of full disclosure, I organized all messages into one file, which can be opened here, and the original here. Not only did Alfa Bank send me no form by email (it only texted a link to a page on the AB website with Visa/Mastercard forms for completion in parallel Russian and English), but it has no such form at all (see it.11 in my post here).

This lie seems to offer the most compelling evidence of a collusion at Alfa Bank aimed at fraudulent debiting of private accounts.

This also suggests that Alfa Bank resorted to lying in its communications to me as well, pretending that it has no way of doing anything to recover the funds fraudulently transferred to Gazprombank—otherwise it would have given that as the reason for its inaction in this matter in its response to the CB's enquiry. The real reason for such inaction by Alfa Bank is presumably greed again: the tricksters spent so much time and effort extracting RUR176k from me that they naturally hated to part with that money, earned as it were, “in the sweat of their brows”, which is only human nature, and I quite understand but do not sympathise with them.

Thus, we can add it.16 to my list of speculative evidence of collusion at Alfa Bank (my post here): “16. Cui bono? Who benefits from Alfa Bank's refusal to do anything to recover the money? Clearly not I as an Alfa Bank customer, nor Alfa Bank shareholders or the bank itself as a financial institution because every universal bank seeks to attract deposits from the general public rather than lose them. So the bottom line is that such passivity from Alfa Bank benefits only fraudsters – those outside and/or within the Bank.” And last but in no way least, it.17: “17. Alfa Bank lied to me and the Bank of Russia”.

This is where I suspend the intensive part of my money-recovery effort until the police and the public prosecutor have completed their investigations into my reports, and move on to its extensive part, which involves publishing posts on this issue on ALL Russian- and English-language socials (starting with myspace, which I joined some 20 years ago), on suitable forums and in my blogs (and possibly in a new one—for example, one entitled “Alfa Bank (Russia) Conspiracy Theory”). The next ports of call on the intensive stage will be Rospotrebnadzor [Russian consumer rights watchdog], the Consumer Rights Protection Society etc., the media (including the foreign media), and finally, to be sure, the courts—a couple of years down the road, when all alternatives have been exhausted. I expect to lose that claim, but this will not stop me - I'll continue writing on the subject in Russian and English for as long as I breathe, and I'm happy to have such an interesting and creative occupation in my retirement.

I admit, however, that I don't get Alfa Bank's game plan: after all, there is a chance (since it felt it necessary to resort to lying) that the court will find for me and order the bank to refund me my money with interest, but by then its brand will have been forever associated on the web with words like “fraudsters”, “fraud” and “fraudulent”. Wouldn't it make more sense to recredit my account now with, say, two transfers of RUR88k each, so that I could report that the money has probably been returned by the swindlers themselves and put it back into my Alfa savings account? I have no intention of spending it other than in an emergency because I saved it “for a rainy day”, and it could remain parked with AB for many years to come. This doesn't seem like a high price for staving off reputation damage.

But Alfa Bank may still have some aces up its sleeve, and may well be hoping for a get out of jail free card—even as it keeps spinning its web of lies. Well, it probably has a fair chance of succeeding—only time will tell. Alfa Bank has chosen the path of lies (probably when it decided to deny the leakage of its customer data), and I the path of truth. I take pains to make sure that each and every one of my assertions is strictly true. I even go as far as to assume that, for example, the swindlers did indeed record our exchange as they claimed and that this recording will be found by the police and one day possibly played back in court, and so I try—to the best of my recollection—to report everything in accordance with this assumption.

Truth, however, does not always triumph over lie, not by a long chalk, and there is no guarantee that it will win in my case—particularly, if the lie is defended by an army of bank lawyers. One thing, however, is absolutely certain: having chosen the path of lies and decided to stick to its guns, Alfa Bank will have to come up next time with a lie that is not so childish and not so is easily exposed.

#AlfaBankFraud