Raids on Moscow’s “Gorbushka” and “City” won’t kill shadow crypto exchangers, RAKIB says

Raids on illegal crypto exchange spots in Moscow can disrupt specific fraud chains, but they do not remove the underlying reason the market exists in Russia, according to Alexander Brazhnikov, director of the Russian Association for Cryptoeconomics, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain (RAKIB). For high-risk payment teams, the useful read here is simple: enforcement can break cash-to-crypto logistics for a while, but it does not create a legal alternative by itself.

1. Brazhnikov said the immediate effect of raids is real but narrow. They cut the infrastructure behind fraudulent schemes for a short period, after which the illegal exchange market quickly recovers.
2. He described the main role of shadow exchangers in the fraud chain: scammers do not work directly with bank accounts because of the risk of oversight by FinCERT and blocks under Federal Law 115-FZ. Instead, illegal crypto exchangers receive cash from couriers who collected money from fraud victims, convert it into cryptocurrency, and send it to foreign wallets.
3. According to Brazhnikov, raids in “City” and on “Gorbushka” hit that logistics layer directly. Staff detentions, equipment seizures, and the freezing of channels can break the chain for a time, while victims get a chance to recover part of their money and specific criminal groups lose infrastructure and income.
4. He also pointed to the deterrent effect of criminal cases under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code, which carries up to 10 years in prison. For cashiers, operators, and couriers, real arrests and the prospect of long sentences can discourage participation more effectively than warnings.
5. The core problem, he said, is the lack of enough legal infrastructure for crypto conversion in Russia. As long as there are not enough legal crypto exchangers with clear rules, demand for illegal services does not disappear; it just changes form. He added that modern fraud schemes increasingly use p2p platforms, online exchangers, droppers, dead drops, and crypto ATMs, so raids on specific addresses do not touch the wider setup.

The operational detail worth noting for PSPs and acquirers is that these cases usually result in arrests of lower-level staff: cashiers, operators, couriers. Organizers are typically abroad or hidden behind multi-layer intermediary chains, so pressure on the street-level layer tends to disrupt execution, not the business model.