What does the simplest bank fraud scheme look like? The unsupervised owner/executive issues a loan to a company they control. The company goes on to transfer the money to the owner/executive’s personal account and declares its insolvency.

These schemes are well-known to the regulators whose job is to expose or even thwart them. To this end, the banks are required to stick to a set of transparent accounting procedures that will prevent them from stealing the funds.

But the misuse and heists do happen every once in a while as seasoned financial executives come up with new stratagems or overhaul the existing ones to slip away from the regulators’ oversight through a maze of loopholes.

The protagonists of our investigation, the banksters Sergei Leontiev and Alexander Zheleznyak, proved to be creative enough to MacGyver an ingenious scam of their own. Let us zoom in on it.