Ivan Kraŭtsoŭ told how he got problems after a Russian namesake was added to the British sanctions list
Former secretary of the Coordination Council, Ivan Kraŭtsoŭ, shared on his Facebook page, using his own example, how personal sanctions work in practice.
On July 6, the UK added Ivan Sergeevich Kravtsov – head of the 4th research department of the National Center "Signal" – to its national sanctions list. This is a Moscow institute that London links to developments related to "Novichok".
However, the British sanctions record, apart from the first name, patronymic, last name, and position, lacks any other identifying information: no date of birth, citizenship, passport number, TIN, or even the spelling of the name and surname in Cyrillic. The European Union, by the way, approached this matter more responsibly: by including employees of the same "Signal" in its sanctions list three days earlier, it specified for each of them the date and place of birth, citizenship, TIN, Cyrillic spelling, and position.
On July 6, Belarusian Ivan Kraŭtsoŭ believes it was precisely because of the British sanctions that he started receiving notifications about his accounts being blocked. The restrictions affected all his services with billing: Google, Wise, bank accounts, and others. However, OpenAI and Anthropic did not block him.
The services required Kraŭtsoŭ to clarify his patronymic. Ivan replied that he is Yauhenavich, and this was enough to unblock them. Moreover, some companies restored access simply after replying to an email and didn't even ask for supporting documents.
Later, Kraŭtsoŭ faced a similar problem when sending a SWIFT payment of several thousand euros outside the EU. It took the correspondent bank 17 days to authorize the transfer.
He draws attention to the fact that the surname Kraŭtsoŭ is quite common in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, and the name Ivan is among the most frequent male names. Therefore, in his opinion, there could be thousands of people with the name and surname Ivan Kraŭtsoŭ. An insufficiently precise sanctions record can thus lead to problems with access to accounts and services for other people with the same name and surname.
Moreover, problems can pop up in the most unexpected places. According to Ivan Kraŭtsoŭ, he recently received a similar request from the bus carrier LuxExpress, which refused to sell him a ticket without clarification of his patronymic.
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