Russian police wind up band of bilkers

The Moscow police carried out a large-scale operation on the neutralization of a criminal group. The policemen managed to terminate the illegal activity of the largest band in the country that was specializing in financial and economic wrongdoings. The fraudsters' victims were the companies and organizations that won different tenders. The gang's participants, pretending to be commercial banks' representatives, offered their services of registration and issuance of the bank guarantees. According to the Russia's Interior Ministry spokesman, the organized criminal group participants were issuing counterfeit bank guarantees with fake seals and signatures. Then, realizing the financial insecurity of the documents, they sent them to the government organizations, report says. Besides the criminals, the band contained bank employees, who approved the counterfeit guarantees after getting requests from the authorities. The investigation revealed that the “financiers” rendered services to the state contracts' winners from all over Russia. The forged papers guaranteed provisions of tenders amounting to 1 billion rubles. The Economic Crime Department conducted more than 40 searches in banks in order to find and seize the documents' blanks. Moreover, the investigators discovered seals of credit institutions and tax offices, copies of banks' and companies' constitutional documents as well as data storage devices and government companies' requests.