This scheme came to light after the death of the chairman of the board of Tekhnobank, V. Rovensky. The money was transferred to another firm's account in one of Moscow's commercial banks. The theft was accomplished by using fake documents. One reason why criminals can act on such a large scale, and virtually with impunity, is the flawed system of Interbank payments introduced by the Central Bank of Russia in 1991. Moreover, to this day the system of verifying banking documents, and more importantly letters of credit, is rather primitive.
Corruption is another factor that makes it easy for large-scale financial fraud.
Cynical law enforcement officials are prone to believe that the leniency in the banking security system is no accident, since some high-ranking state officials have been known to benefit from the financial scams. The crime groups which commit this fraud run well- organized, sophisticated operations. Evidence of the size of the structure behind this type of crime came in late 1994, when police made arrests in the case of an organized criminal group which specialized in financial schemes in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Orenburg. Its organizers were thirty to forty year old ethnic Chechens and Ingush. The group had its own security squad, a powerful computer center equipped with the latest software and an extensive network of agents in the divisions of the Central Bank, which provided the group with banking forms and stamps and were responsible for organizing the acceptance of fake documents and the transfer of the money received with these documents.