The accounts of customers Tinkoff Bank was blocked after he had a deal to sell bitcoins on LocalBitcoins service. The victim David Ohanyan told his story portal “360”.
According to him, the service LocalBitcoins was zarekomendoval in one of the articles in the magazine “T-W”, belonging to the Bank. The material contained warnings about the dangers of deals with cryptocurrency, but the information about their ban was not, explains the client.
Before the New year, David decided to sell its bitcoins in the amount of 40 thousand rubles. A few days later, the Bank has blocked all the money was in his account, reported the existence of a claim from the sender and asked to comment on the deal.
“In this case the counterparty of the client Tinkoff. Translation it was necessary to confirm by means of sms and it was named”, — he said.
The offer to return the money to sender David refused.
Three days later, the Bank’s representatives in a telephone conversation with David he stated that he does not see opportunities to serve him as a client, all accounts are currently blocked for using the remote control. To withdraw funds it can only in a certain branch of a credit institution under a written statement.
However, after the story of David has hit the Internet and became public, representatives of the Bank have unblocked all of his cards, returned the premium service, but have requested the documents for each transaction over the past two months.
David fears that because of this increased attention can get into “black lists” of individuals and will have problems with opening accounts and obtaining credit cards in other organizations.
In turn, the Bank also announced the official position that asked to publish unabridged.
“1. Under current law, the Bank should engage in financial monitoring of operations. In relation to this client was a suspected fraudulent transaction, therefore we have temporarily limited e-banking services and asked the author clarifying documents. Account not frozen ever. After conducting a comprehensive inspection restrictions were lifted.
2. We have no restrictions on bitcoin transactions if they are committed within the law.
3. This is a personal position of the author. Disclaimer in the description of the article indicated that it describes the very personal experience of the author. In addition, the editorial policy of the publication, in principle, not dependent Tinkoff Bank. About selection issues or publish any material it is better to go directly to the editor.
4. The customer’s account was never blocked. At the moment, to them, in principle, does not apply any restrictions. Requested by us within 115-FZ the documents are irrelevant to the previously installed (and removed after the inspection) limitations of remote services. At the moment we are awaiting a response from the client on request within the 115-FZ (“On countering the legalization (laundering) of incomes obtained in a criminal way and financing of terrorism”).
Experts explain formally the Bank is right, since the legal status of transactions with cryptocurrencies in the Russian legislation is not defined. Although selling cryptocurrency is not a reason for the withdrawal of funds to be used for such transactions traditional banks, with their forced suspicion is not entirely correct.
We will remind, in January, large Indian banks have warned customers that conduct operations with cryptocurrency, about possible blocking of accounts.
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