Non-cash money as a subject of theft

The article deals with controversial issues of considering non-cash money as the subject of theft. The following scientific positions on this issue are criticized: firstly, the established investigative and judicial practice, which is forced to broadly interpret the rules on theft due to the lack of special rules providing criminal and legal protection of the rights of the owner of non-cash money; secondly, positions arguing the qualification of the unlawful taking of non-cash money only as a theft on the grounds that the method of committing such an act can only be secret; thirdly, those positions that propose to recognize the illegal taking of virtual objects (digital rights, digital currency, non-cash money, etc.) that belonged to a certain person on legal grounds as a theft, and to independently criminalize cases of illegal taking of virtual objects that are obtained by their previous owner in circumvention of the law. It is proposed to limit the elements of thefts to the illegal taking of another person's property in the form of a thing and to introduce into Chapter 21 of the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation the elements of «digital» property crimes that are not thefts, since the mechanism for committing the latter is different than in case of thefts.