Stealthy features: the number of grey taxi chats has exceeded 11,000
In Russia, the number of chat rooms, groups, and communities offering illegal taxi services has tripled in two years, analysts estimate. Their number has exceeded 11 thousand, and the number of users is 22.7 million people. Experts note that passengers use this method of finding a car because of the rising price of taxis, and drivers switch to these chats due to the overregulation of the sphere and high costs if they work in a legal field. About how the sphere of parallel carrier calls works, what deputies and industry representatives propose to remedy the situation, see the Izvestia article
How illegal taxi chats work
The audience of illegal taxi-hailing channels is 22.7 million people, according to the office of Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of Competition Sergei Lisovsky and experts from the Association of the Self-Employed of Russia. This is almost 11.3 thousand channels in various social networks and messengers. In 2024, similar monitoring was carried out by ANO Digital Platforms, and at that time there were 4.1 thousand such communities. Thus, their number has almost tripled in a year and a half.
In addition, analysts interviewed almost 10,000 passengers in Kazan, Samara, Novosibirsk, Tyumen and Nizhny Novgorod. It turned out that 85.5% of the respondents are afraid to travel with illegal immigrants, but 44.3% are willing to take risks for a lower price. At the same time, 56.5% of respondents understand that in the event of an accident, the driver has no financial responsibility, they are also aware of the risks of kidnapping, robbery and simply rudeness.
"This pattern of behavior is forced and is due not only to savings, but also to the lack of an affordable alternative to transportation," analysts believe.
Izvestia got acquainted with such chats and groups. In their descriptions or pinned messages, fares are indicated, and thousands and even tens of thousands of people are listed in each of them — drivers and passengers.
"Who can pick up from the street on May 1 to the new department store," the user asks in the Vyksa Taxi chat.
"Bos," the driver replies, ready to take the order. And then he reports in the same chat: "I took it."
"Severnaya, tire service, two people, Vostochnaya," a user orders in a similar chat in Zheleznogorsk.
"6 [minutes]," the taxi driver replies.
Maxim Taxi believes that the reason for the current situation with an increase in the number of illegal import chats is the discrepancy between the current regulation and the real structure of the market.
"Today, the same requirements apply to both professional taxi companies and private drivers in private cars, for whom transportation is a side job or an occasional activity. But these are different economic models," the company's press service said.
As a result, a private driver cannot meet the requirements comparable to the responsibilities of a motor transport company: daily medical and technical examinations, processing of a large volume of documents, purchase of special insurance products, and so on.
"For many, this is organizationally and economically impossible, so some drivers go into informal channels," Maxim noted.
What about the safety of such trips
Taxis have traditionally been considered one of the most criminalized areas of transportation, but with the advent of aggregators, the situation has changed significantly, said political analyst Pavel Sklyanchuk.
"Digital platforms have provided transparency of travel, driver identification, tracking, and thus largely displaced crime from the industry," he said. — At the same time, the withdrawal of part of the transportation into the shadows, outside the framework of platform and state control, once again creates the ground for criminalization both against passengers and against the drivers themselves.
According to the monitoring data of ANO Digital Platforms, in 2025, the number of media publications featuring incidents involving drivers working outside taxi ordering services increased by 71.5%. And the number of mentions of murders committed on trips outside taxi booking services increased by 366%, physical violence — 140%, criminal cases — 257%. However, analysts clarify: the fact that the driver is present in media mentions or official statistics does not mean that he is guilty of what happened.
Nevertheless, the authors of the study note that an illegal trip deprives both the passenger and the driver of protection.
"Both sides are deprived of basic security tools: travel history, emergency call capabilities, and identification of the other party. Thus, the gray zone is systematically and symmetrically dangerous for all participants in transportation," the document says.
The way out of this situation could be the legalization of private drivers in private cars, Sergei Lisovsky believes.
"This will give people safe, affordable rides and bring millions of carriers back into the legal field. The transport blockade of small towns is not a verdict, but a task that we can solve," the deputy told Izvestia.
Maxim Taxi also supported him, saying that the main thing is to differentiate regulation.
"It is necessary to legally separate professional taxis and the activities of private drivers in private cars. There should be different rules for these models," the company said. — For professional taxi companies, the current requirements may be maintained as for permanent commercial activity. Private drivers need a separate, simpler and more efficient mode of operation within the digital economy."
Dmitry Gusev, first deputy chairman of the State Duma's control Committee, said that half of all Russian taxi drivers, or about 1.5 million people, are currently working in the gray zone.
"People go to chat rooms where their services are cheaper than on official aggregators, and they can sell their services at no extra charge," he explained. — And they will never comply with the requirements of the taxi law, it is impossible for them.
Many private entrepreneurs just earn literally two or three hours a week and are not going to go out full-time. For example, these are mothers who took their children to classes and had free time.
— And the struggle against this is paradoxical. Therefore, it is necessary to change the taxi law or adopt a new law that will enable these people to earn extra money in peace," the deputy said.
According to federal law, the carrier must have the right to transport passengers and luggage by passenger taxi, information about the carrier, the car and the order service must be entered into the relevant registers, and the order service should not turn into an anonymous application channel, said Maria Yakovleva, director of the Yakovlev and Partners law group.
In addition, starting in 2026, the responsibility of the passenger taxi carrier for the lack of mandatory passenger liability insurance has also been explicitly highlighted.
And Daria Mitina, chairman of the Novy Trud trade union, drew attention to the fact that drivers are also required to undergo daily pre-trip medical examinations, although, in her opinion, such rules "can even theoretically be observed only in megacities."
As a result, compliance with the law requires costs exceeding economic feasibility, which encourages drivers to go into the shadows, said Alexander Basalaev, an expert in the field of taxi development and urban mobility.
Maria Yakovleva added that orders from illegal taxis appear not only through Telegram channels, chat rooms, and closed groups, but also through dispatchers, acquaintances, or ads.
"And now we can really talk about the growth of a parallel transportation market, where participants are deliberately avoiding regulation," she said. — And in some cases, such activities can indeed acquire the characteristics of an organized illegal business: when there are channel administrators, order distribution, constant cash flow, concealment of income and lack of access to transportation.
Maxim Taxi added that the increase in the scale of the gray market creates a serious problem for the legal one: the stricter and less enforceable the rules become, the more the market goes into the gray zone. Thus, in the struggle for travel safety, this very safety for drivers and passengers is lost.
In a legal taxi, you can identify the carrier, the car, the booking service, the insurer, the trip history, and in an illegal scheme, the passenger often gets into the car with a person about whom there is no verifiable data, Maria Yakovleva noted.
"If there is an accident, conflict, injury, loss of belongings or a crime, it will be more difficult for the passenger to prove the fact of transportation, identify the person responsible and receive compensation," she said.
The expert noted that criminal liability is possible for the organizers of such chats under the article on illegal entrepreneurship. And an ordinary private trader who occasionally gives a passenger a ride for money is more likely to risk administrative and tax liability — after the taxi reform, registers of carriers, cars and ordering services appeared, which means that illegal transportation is easier to compare with the lack of a permit or entry in the registry.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
