Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency has dismantled transnational crime rings running money mule farms to process online casino payments via bank accounts of Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz citizens.
Foreign nationals were registered with individual identification numbers (IINs), SIM cards, and bank accounts, after which mobile devices with logged-in banking apps were handed over to mule handlers. A P2P platform was used to manage the cash flows, with settlements also handled in cryptocurrency.
Three Uzbek nationals using 89 Kazakh bank cards were detained in the Turkistan region and Almaty. Transaction volume across the controlled cards reached 500 million tenge. In the Zhambyl region, authorities broke up another group that generated a card turnover of 9.8 billion tenge. Officers seized 180 bank cards, 15 mule phones, 26 SIM cards, $50,000, 27,000 USDT, four cars, firearms, and ammunition. A court remanded five suspects in custody.