By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-06-17

A 70-year-old woman owed money on a loan. By the time collectors were done with her, she had suffered a heart attack and been hospitalized. Her debt had been handed to an automated "night-calling bot" -- a system programmed to ring debtors and their families through the night, broadcasting threats in a synthesized, aggressive "Chechen accent." The agent who had been working her account refused to keep harassing her. His managers put the bot on her instead.

This is a business model. Russia's debt collection industry has exploded into one of the country's most lucrative corporate sectors, driven by a consumer credit crisis that has ensnared roughly two out of every three working-age Russians. Despite federal laws designed to protect borrowers, the number of registered collection firms has nearly doubled in five years, and the profits of the top firms now run into the tens of billions of rubles.

Two-thirds of Russians carry debt

Data from the Central Bank of Russia show 49.7 million citizens currently hold active loans or credit lines -- seven million more than at the start of 2022. Particularly troubling is the rapid expansion of high-interest payday loans: the number of Russians borrowing exclusively from microfinance organizations (MFOs) jumped from 3.8 million in 2022 to 6.3 million. The segment juggling overlapping debt from both traditional banks and MFOs more than doubled, from 3.5 million to 7.5 million people.

This explosive demand for debt recovery has driven rapid corporate growth. The number of registered collection firms jumped from 446 in 2020 to 750 by 2025. By the end of that year, the total agency collection market reached 1.5 trillion RUB ($17.1 billion), a 39% surge in monetary volume and a 59% jump in individual cases in a single year.

The momentum continued into 2026. In the first quarter alone, creditors handed 14.4 million delinquent accounts to collectors, totaling 355.7 billion RUB ($4.1 billion) -- a three-year high. For the first time on record, the volume of toxic debt generated by payday lenders surpassed that of mainstream banks. MFOs offloaded 163.7 billion RUB ($1.9 billion) in bad debt to collectors in that quarter, edging out the 156.5 billion RUB ($1.8 billion) transferred by traditional banks.

Billions for the top three

As bad debts cascade through the financial system, the top collection agencies are capturing enormous profits. In 2025, three dominant firms each cleared more than 10 billion RUB in revenue.

First Collection Bureau (PKB), the undisputed market leader, generated 22.5 billion RUB ($257 million) in revenue and 7.2 billion RUB ($82 million) in net profit. Its clients include Sberbank, Alfa-Bank, VTB, Russian Standard, and Uralsib. Moscow-based ID Collect brought in 13.4 billion RUB ($153 million) in revenue and 2.8 billion RUB ($32 million) in net profit. The firm operates under Fintech Group, a subsidiary of Svojbank and Online Microfinance, which runs payday lender Moneyman. Third-ranked Phoenix -- the internal collection arm of T-Bank, formerly known as Tinkoff -- converted nearly 13 billion RUB ($149 million) in revenue into close to 6 billion RUB ($69 million) in net profit. Beyond these three, only four other companies cleared 1 billion RUB in 2025.

Intimidation by design

Whistleblowers describe an industry built on psychological distress. A former collector from Astrakhan, who spoke to independent Russian media, detailed the standard playbook for accounts four to 18 months overdue.

"First, we would call them and claim that we had bought their debt, telling them that instead of 40,000 rubles, they would now have to pay us 120,000 rubles," he said.

Collectors explicitly instruct debtors never to contact the original bank. When panicked borrowers do call, the integrated networks between lenders and collectors close the trap: the lender logs the call, alerts the firm, and agents swoop in offering to cut the inflated debt "in half" if the victim pays immediately.

Legal experts have tracked new intimidation tactics as well. Lawyer Sergey Gagarin noted that agencies now send mobile text messages disguised as official police subpoenas, or place calls impersonating local officers. Court records show borrowers describing threats made to their coworkers, insomnia, persistent fear, and explicit threats to confiscate family pets.

The penalties for such conduct rarely deter it. Russia's Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP) logged a record 33,000 formal complaints against collectors -- up 4% from the prior year -- and found 10,708 fully justified. Yet courts consistently hand out trivial punishments. The collection firm Dobrozaim was fined just 50,000 RUB ($540) for illegal debt-collection actions. A Penza resident who suffered extreme harassment and explicit threats of physical violence sued for 5 million RUB ($57,100) and received 20,000 RUB ($228). A Yaroslavl resident walked away with 5,000 RUB ($57) after a robotic phone campaign upended her life.

Facing inescapable harassment and compounding debt, more Russians are turning to personal bankruptcy. In the past year, 568,000 Russians were declared bankrupt -- a 32% increase. Even so, the collection machine keeps moving forward.