The Central Bank of Russia reported that dropper cards for illegal transactions have risen in price to 30-40 thousand rubles on the black market.
Dropper cards are issued to fictitious persons and sold to scammers.
The head of the Central Bank's financial monitoring service, Bogdan Shablya, told RBC that over the past year the price of these cards has increased 5-6 times.
The Central Bank is strengthening control over drops by introducing AI technologies. The new method helps to quickly identify suspicious transactions.
Dropper cards are most often used by shadow financial platforms operating not only in the Russian Federation.
Fraudsters use a card “warming” scheme to attract new participants to their activities.
Immediately after purchase, the card is used for normal transactions so as not to arouse suspicion among banks.
Then they start to conduct suspicious transactions, in which at least 700 thousand bank cards of individuals are already involved.
