Moscow arrests Intercom executives over Qiwi wallet verification for more than 24,000 ghost accounts and alleged 30 billion ruble cross-border withdrawals

Russian law enforcement in Moscow has detained the heads of Intercom, a group of companies accused of building infrastructure for withdrawals and servicing of illegal online casinos, bookmakers, exchangers, and drug shops. For high-risk PSPs, the useful part is not the courtroom drama: the case is another reminder that wallet verification, KYC recycling, and cash-out rails are exactly where investigators tend to look first.

1. On 25 June, Meshchansky Court in Moscow ordered the organizers of the scheme into pre-trial detention. The case is being investigated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Investigative Committee of Russia, and it is framed under Article 187 part 2 and Article 193.1 part 3, both tied to payment and cross-border transfer activity.
2. According to the source, the group built infrastructure for cashing out and servicing illegal online casinos, bookmakers, exchangers, and drug shops. That mix matters because it is exactly the kind of merchant stack that tends to contaminate adjacent payment flows, especially where one backend is used to support several high-risk verticals at once.
3. At the time of the arrests, investigators seized documents and electronic media said to confirm the use of stolen personal data to verify more than 24,000 Qiwi wallets in 2022-2023. In practice, that points to a familiar pattern: fake or stolen identities used to scale wallet registration, pass verification, and move funds through accounts that look alive on paper.
4. Searches were also carried out at the suspects’ homes and offices. The source says the organizers are believed by investigators to be abroad, which is usually where the operational layer of these schemes gets harder to touch, while the local onboarding, verification, and mule-account side gets rolled up first.
5. The source also says Qiwi tried to “negotiate” with the wrong people at the Central Bank, after which the Bank of Russia revoked Qiwi Bank’s license on 21 February 2024, and the organization was liquidated in December 2025. For PSPs, that sequence is the practical takeaway: once the regulator decides the control environment is broken, the corporate structure tends to stop mattering very quickly.

The headline figure in the source is the alleged withdrawal of 30 billion rubles abroad. Whether you are a PSP, acquirer, or bank partner, the operational lesson is the same: if your rails can be used for large-scale verification fraud and cash-out across multiple prohibited verticals, the regulator will not treat that as a narrow merchant onboarding issue.