High ranking official reveals lawmakers in russia are introducing a new law that gives the government the right to confiscate cryptocurrencies.
Russia`s Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov claims that the government is currently making some changes to the country`s criminal code to allow the authorities to confiscate the received cryptocurrencies.
Officials say cryptocurrencies are also a tool for money laundering at home. He argues that Russia`s Digital Financial Assets (DFA) encryption has been instrumental in addressing this issue, but new changes to the criminal code provide additional protection.
This allows us to impose restrictions and seize virtual assets said Krasnov. According to some local industry insiders, the government does not have an opportunity to confiscate cryptoassets.
“It is impossible to confiscate digital assets out of a portfolio like confiscating other types of assets,” Nikita Soshnikov, a former senior attorney at Deloitte CIS stated.
“But there was one big case where an FSB officer was found guilty of bribery and the court officially confiscated 0.1 and 4.70235 BTC of government revenues,” he said.
Soshkov said Russia began offering cryptocurrency confiscation in 2019, many years before the DFA was passed.
“The General Prosecutor’s Office is still an important part of the project, and in this context, the current comments are only confirmation of the agreed plan,” he added. Krasnov, a former vice president of the Russian Commission of Inquiry, became Prosecutor General in early 2020.
Last year, he argued that cryptocurrencies, which have grown 25 times since 2015, are the driving force behind Russian cybercrime. Krasnov said in October that Russian authorities must declare cryptocurrencies in competitive locations.
According to local opinion polls, Krasnov himself has been involved in several corruption-related disputes.
