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- Nail in the drop: control over the number of bank cards will start working in December
Nail in the drop: control over the number of bank cards will start working in December
Restrictions on the number of bank cards for Russians can be earned as early as December, Izvestia found out. At the same time, a service should be ready with which you can check where and in which bank the cards are open. It was decided to limit their number to 20 in all banks and five in one. The initiative will greatly help the authorities in the fight against fraudsters who withdraw funds with the help of droppers — bank customers who provide their cards to the attackers. How scammers lure Russians into crime — in the material of Izvestia.
When will the control over the number of cards start working?
Limits on the number of cards for one person can be earned as early as December. This was reported to Izvestia by Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market. By the same time, a service can be launched to control the amount of "plastic" — thanks to it, customers will be able to find out where and when they released it.
The initiative proposes to introduce two limits: no more than five cards in one bank and no more than 20 in all for one client. Before that, a limit of 10 cards was supposed, but this idea was abandoned.
The demand for such measures did not appear out of thin air, said Vladimir Chernov from Freedom Finance Global. In 2024 alone, fraudsters stole 27.5 billion rubles from customers, which is almost three quarters more than a year earlier. They carry out their activities thanks to droppers who help them withdraw and cash out funds.
Droppers are bank customers who provide their cards for cashing out money or making transfers in favor of shady businesses or other illegal transactions. These can be funds from victims of fraudsters, money from drug dealers, crypto exchanges and pirate sites.
A reasonable limit on the number of cards that can be issued per person in one bank is useful in the fight against fraudsters and droppers, the press service of the Central Bank told Izvestia.
— For the client, the difficulty arises precisely at the moment when he wants to issue a new card. If the limit has already been exhausted, there is no mechanism today that allows you to quickly discard a card in order to make room for a new one," explained Andrey Emelin, head of the National Financial Market Council (NSFM).
At the same time, according to the NSFR, only about 6% of Russians use more than ten cards. This means that a limit of 20 pieces is enough to avoid inconveniencing the vast majority of customers.
— Restrictions on the number of cards are an absolutely justified measure. The scale of the dropper schemes has reached the point that people may not even know that they have cards in other banks that are used in fraudulent schemes," said Daria Verestnikova, CEO of STCrypt.
The card number control service will allow users to quickly see all the cards linked to their identity and detect those that were issued without their knowledge, said Alexey Postrigailo, senior partner at Ensain IT integrator.
Financial authorities have the opportunity to quickly create a service to control the number of cards, says Igor Rastorguev, a leading analyst at AMarkets. According to him, it can be made following the example of the "Know your Customer" system, which has been successfully operating for businesses since 2022. The platform will allow you to see all active cards in one place through data exchange between banks and the Central Bank and may well be ready by December.
How Russians become droppers
The restriction to 20 cards in total and up to five in one bank severely affects the droppership base, Alexey Postrigailo is sure. Such schemes are usually based on "farms" of dozens or even hundreds of cards, which are used to split transfers, cash out and disguise the origin of funds.
By the end of 2024, about 700,000 people were involved in bank card cashing schemes, and the total number of citizens somehow connected with transfers to suspicious accounts reached 2 million, said Igor Rastorguev from AMarkets. Dropping has become a real industry: the criminal market requires about 80,000 new drops every month, and rewards for card transfers have increased 14-fold.
Fraudsters operate in a very organized manner, and the low level of legal and financial literacy of the population exacerbates the situation, said Ksenia Sautina, a lawyer at the Mikhailov & Co law agency. Droppage is especially common among young people — schoolchildren and students who do not fully understand that other people's money is passing through their bank accounts every day, participating in cashing, shady transfers or fraudulent schemes.
Significant amounts are still circulating in the gray market. This creates a demand for schemes for withdrawing and disguising funds, because it is more profitable for attackers to split up the flows and transfer money through plastic, explained Alexey Postrigailo. Some people are ready to "hand over the card" — temporarily provide banking details or the card itself for money. For them, this is a low‑cost way to earn money: no high qualifications are required, often you just need to register a SIM card and receive a transfer.
The price range for one card on the black market now varies from 20,000 to 150,000 rubles, said Vasily Kutyin, Ingo Bank's Director of Analytics. This indicates an unprecedented demand from organized criminal groups, which actively recruit citizens, especially young people and socially vulnerable categories.
On June 18, 2025, the Federation Council approved a law criminalizing the transfer of access to bank cards and electronic wallets to fraudsters. Now, for complicity in the fraudulent chain, droppers face up to three years in prison, and the organizers of such schemes — up to six years and a fine of up to 1 million rubles.
In parallel with the limitation of the number of cards, additional control measures are being introduced, Igor Rastorguev noted. The authorities are launching a second package of anti-fraud measures — labeling calls from Russian companies and criminalizing AI fraud. There is a separate system of self—locking for remote loan processing - it is important because fraudsters often apply in other people's names in order to gain access to money and government services. All these measures together create a multi-level protection of citizens from various schemes of deception.
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