The management and the teller of the Tomsk division of Sberbank were arrested for stealing approximately 520 million rubles during a period of eight months. The theft was accomplished by using fake documents. Four forged letters of credit originating in Chechnya were used to steal 3.2 billion rubles. One reason why criminals can act on such a large scale, and virtually with impunity, is the flawed system of inter-bank 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. In late 1994 police made arrests in a case of an organized criminal group which specialized in financial schemes in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Orenburg. Its organizers were 30 to 40 year old ethnic Chechens and Ingush. The group had it 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.