Law enforcement authorities in Kazakhstan have opened over a thousand investigations into cases involving cryptocurrency in just two years.
The financial damages caused to victims exceed $15 million, according to the interior ministry of the country which aspires to be a regional crypto hub.
Fraud accounts for majority of crypto crime cases
More than 1,000 criminal cases related to operations with cryptocurrency have been registered in Kazakhstan over the course of the past two years, local media reported citing official data.
The figure was made public by Kazakhstan’s Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Sanzhar Adilov at a forum devoted to discussing ways to identify and probe crimes committed through crypto platforms.
Quoted by Kazakhstanskaya Pravda and the state-controlled information portal Polisia.kz on Monday, the government official broke down the numbers:
“Of these, 60% are cases of fraud, 25% constitute illegal activity by cryptocurrency exchanges, and 15% are cases of money laundering through digital assets.”
The total of financial losses incurred by both individuals and organizations exceeded 8 billion Kazakhstani tenge (over $15 million), Adilov also highlighted during the event in the Southern city of Taraz.
His department is now implementing a “comprehensive set of systemic measures,” together with other government agencies, to combat cybercrime, he noted.
One of the initiatives is the establishment of a special “anti-fraud center” responsible for dealing with suspicious websites and phone numbers.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 26,000 sites and 64 million calls of this nature have been blocked, the deputy minister detailed.
The conference was attended by other law enforcement officials who shared their experiences in areas such as identifying digital traces, for example, and addressed challenges with improving the investigative skills of officers working in that area.
In his address, Sanzhar Adilov emphasized that while the digitalization of the economy brings new opportunities, it also creates new risks.
Crypto hub Kazakhstan cracks down on crypto crime
Kazakhstan appeared on the global crypto map when it attracted cryptocurrency miners in the wake of China’s ban on the activity and other Bitcoin-related operations a few years ago.
After sorting out issues with spiking electricity consumption, blamed on the booming sector, the government of the Central Asian nation took steps to tap into its profits.
Miners were offered to trade their minted digital coins domestically, initially only on a limited number of exchanges licensed as residents of the Astana International Financial Center (AIFC).
Appetite comes with eating, and eventually, Kazakh authorities took a course towards expanding the country’s crypto market by preparing to legalize crypto trading beyond the capital’s financial hub, launching a crypto cards pilot, and announcing a plan to test coin payments in a “Crypto City,” among other initiatives, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
However, the country’s shadow crypto economy and illicit digital asset transactions have been growing in parallel, and Kazakhstan has made it clear it won’t put up with this. A string of reports this year indicated there’s an ongoing crackdown on such activities.
In September, financial and law enforcement officials unraveled a scheme to mine cryptocurrencies using illegally sourced electrical power, claiming it inflicted damages amounting to $16 million.
Kazakh authorities also announced they had seized $10 million worth of digital assets from a massive crypto pyramid which defrauded investors across the region, including Russia and Belarus.
Later that month, Kazakhstan dismantled allegedly the largest crypto money laundering service in the former Soviet space, an exchange known as RAKS on the dark web.
In early October, Astana claimed it had confiscated almost $17 million in digital currencies from 130 illegal cryptocurrency exchanges busted in 2025 alone.
Also this year, the country’s central bank revealed that some $15 billion have been transferred out of Kazakhstan through crypto. The monetary authority blamed insufficient regulations.
