Analyst explained the purpose of mass bank card skimming

Aggressive advertising of bank card dropshipping has begun to appear en masse not only in messengers and the darknet, but also on the streets of major cities. According to Maxim Gorbunov, an analyst at the marketing strategy agency MAKS, the main consumers of dropship cards are illegal cryptocurrency traders, online casinos, and traditional criminals, including fraudsters, arms and drug dealers, etc.

"[Currently] transactions involving digital assets are almost impossible without the involvement of drop cards. Such payment instruments are used as virtual wallets to accept cash and further convert the funds into various crypto-assets. Then the digital cryptocurrency is withdrawn to the card on the other side," Gorbunov commented to Izvestia.

According to him, most of the participants of crypto-business in Russia use the services of drops. Banks have to fight with drop cards and suspicious transactions, they block accounts in accordance with FZ-115 "On countering legalization (laundering) of proceeds of crime and financing of terrorism". Meanwhile, only one of the popular portals declared more than 500 crypto exchanges, a significant part of them will offer to pay for cryptocurrency with dropships, and this does not confuse anyone.

As Gorbunov, who monitors the shadow sale of bank cards on the Web, noted, the bulk of plastic serves non-criminal business.

"Every month we observe more than 500 thousand advertisements about buying or selling cards. But this only speaks about the demand and supply of cards on the market. So far, we do not see a drop in requests," he informed.

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