The proposal, published on the official portal for regulatory legal acts, adds a new ground for freezing accounts to the law on countering the legalization of criminal proceeds. Frank Media spotted the document, which was also reported by Izvestia and The Moscow Times.
Under current rules, banks must freeze the funds of people on Rosfinmonitoring's list within 24 hours. The list contains more than 15,000 people the authorities consider involved in extremist or terrorist activity.
The new mechanism would check clients' full name and date of birth. If matches are found, transactions on the account would be suspended for five working days. If the restrictions are not extended during that time, access to the money would be restored. Rosfinmonitoring itself would set the criteria for a partial match.
In an explanatory note, the agency attributes the initiative to attempts to circumvent restrictions by using different spellings of personal data. As of February 1, 2026, more than 800 people on the list had several variants of their first or last name on record.
Experts interviewed by Izvestia warn of a rise in erroneous freezes, including among people with common surnames. By one estimate, the number of such cases could grow by 15-25%.
Artur Leer, managing partner at the Lex Alliance law firm, told The Moscow Times that he estimated the increase in freezes at around 20% and pointed to the risk of errors and temporary inconvenience for law-abiding citizens and businesses. Yekaterina Kosareva, managing partner at the VMT Consult agency, noted that in 90-95% of cases banks' automated systems trigger false positives, relying on formal criteria.
Leer noted that Russian banks currently have no fully functional mechanism for quickly unfreezing funds. Financial adviser Alexei Rodin pointed to the need to build a process for appealing a freeze, since unfreezing money sometimes takes more than a week. Financial expert Alexei Krichevsky urged banks to "tighten up the algorithms" to impose restrictions more accurately.
Public discussion of the draft law ends on September 24. If adopted, the new rules would take effect 270 days after the law's official publication.