Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency has uncovered a money laundering scheme involving local university students who used their bank cards to receive and transfer funds.
The agency’s Department for the Abai Region busted an illegal cashing-out operation involving university students in Semey. According to investigators, the bank card of one of the six detained students received more than 16 million tenge from 25 individuals.
The students used their bank accounts to receive funds, which were then split into smaller amounts, transferred to other accounts, and withdrawn as cash. This obscured the source of the money and complicated tracking the financial flows. Investigators established that the student accounts were used to take in transfers as part of illegal operations by a group recruiting drop cards to launder funds.