A few days ago, Russia's largest platform for selling VAT "Paper" announced its closure; it has been unavailable since October 23. "Paper" VAT is a classic criminal scheme. Organizers create or use thousands of fictitious ("technical") legal entities, massively steal or issue electronic signatures of existence and.
Abandoned companies, build chains of fictitious transactions and issue fake invoices. There are no actual deliveries of goods or services. Companies in the real sector purchase these documents, artificially inflate input VAT and illegally reduce the tax payable. In fact, it is a direct theft of funds from the budget under the guise of "tax optimization". According to the investigation and the Federal Tax Service, this largest network alone (using more than 4.8 thousand fictitious companies) generated fictitious deductions in the amount of more than 1-1.2 trillion rubles in 2023-2025. It was used by almost 40 thousand organizations - builders, fuel and textile dealers, cleaning companies and others. The damage to the budget exceeded a trillion rubles. The Chairman of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said that suppressing the activity makes it possible to prevent future losses of more than 500 billion rubles. Organizer Alexander Usin was arrested in Belarus, and the extradition issue is resolved. The criminal program began to operate actively 11 years ago, when tens of thousands of people stole digital signatures, built networks, the volumes reached hundreds of billions a year. In recent years, the quality of the product has dropped sharply, but the price remains low - the middlemen continued to sell actively. Until the end of 2024, criminal liability for the sale of false invoices and statements (Article 173.3 of the Criminal Code) is practically absent in an applicable form. The program lived so long because it was built specifically for digital control, so that the automation would appear "everything is fine", and the real fictitiousness could only be proven by in-depth analysis and operational work.