Ukraine's Zelenskyy proposes tougher criminal penalties for drop accounts and fraud call centers

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent two bills to the Verkhovna Rada that would impose criminal penalties for organizing fraudulent call centers and using bank cards belonging to drop accounts. For PSPs, acquirers, and banks working around high-risk flows, the practical point is obvious: Ukraine is moving to make mule-account activity more expensive and easier to shut down inside the banking system.

1. The proposed rules would punish operations involving other people’s cards for criminal purposes with fines from 51,000 ($1145) to 170,000 hryvnias ($3820), restricted freedom, or prison terms of 2 to 6 years.
2. If the offense is repeated, the penalty could rise to up to 8 years in prison.
3. The bills also target the organization of fraudulent call centers, tying card misuse to the broader cash-out and laundering infrastructure that high-risk merchants and their payment partners spend a lot of time trying to detect.
4. Zelenskyy also announced internal regulation for banks, with updated banking algorithms meant to give financial institutions more room to identify and block suspicious accounts quickly and to prevent tax evasion.
5. The initiative is framed as part of efforts to combat schemes for withdrawing and legalizing illegal funds and to fulfill agreements with international partners.

For payment providers, the useful signal is not just the criminal penalties on paper. Ukraine is explicitly pushing banks toward faster detection and blocking of suspicious accounts, which usually means tighter monitoring around card usage, account ownership, and transaction patterns linked to drop networks.