Kazakhstan has begun tracking and blocking money transfers to fraudsters

This is the total amount of all suspicious transfers that were blocked by the new Fraudulent Transactions Data Exchange Center launched by the National Bank of the Republic of Kazakhstan in July 2024. According to the Director of the Information and Communications Department of the National Bank, Asan Akhmetzhan, as of December 6, 2024, 11.7 thousand fraudulent incidents were registered within the framework of the anti-fraud center. Most of them – 65.5%, or 7.7 thousand – were recorded thanks to information from law enforcement agencies. The remaining suspicious transfers were reported to the center by financial market participants – payment organizations, banks, mobile operators, etc., Finprom.kz reports.

The center is a digital platform that allows all participants connected to it to exchange messages in real time and quickly block suspicious transactions. They are marked with a special label and tracked by both sending and receiving banks. Therefore, even if the money was written off from the victim's account, it can be blocked and not paid to the potential fraudulent recipient. According to the National Bank of the Republic of Kazakhstan, most of the blocked funds (760.9 million tenge, or 78.7%) were recognized as suspicious transfers on the side of the sending bank. The payment of 206.1 million tenge was prevented by the receiving banks.

Statistics from the first months of the anti-fraud center's work show that among the registered incidents, fraudulent actions most often occurred during telephone conversations. The share of such offenses was 25.5%. In second place in terms of the share of the most common cases of fraud recorded by the center was false investment (18.9%). The platform also targeted cases of fraud in social networks and instant messengers (17.6%).

Cases of fictitious sales on the Internet, fraud through droppers or sales through fictitious fraudulent sites – "mirrors" were recorded much less frequently. However, criminals use many different methods to extort money or steal account holder data. With the advent of the anti-fraud center, fraudsters came up with a new legend that they are employees of this organization and in order to protect people from suspicious transactions, they ask to provide personal data or follow a link to a phishing site. At the same time, employees of the National Bank warn: anti-fraud center specialists never call individuals, they only work with banks, financial institutions, and various IT companies.

The work of the anti-fraud center is aimed precisely at preventing the transfer of funds in the event of fraudulent actions. After all, if the chain of actions of the fraudster is complete, the chances of finding the criminal after the fact and recovering damages from him are small. This is evidenced by statistics. According to the Committee on Legal Statistics and Special Records of the Prosecutor General's Office, 22.9 thousand criminal cases on the facts of Internet fraud were registered in the country in January-December last year. Of these, in 81.8% of cases, the pre-trial investigation period was interrupted due to "failure to identify the person who committed the criminal offense." And this trend has been observed for several years in a row: since 2019, the share of criminal cases closed with this wording annually ranged from 71% to 79%.

In terms of completed cases of Internet fraud, the most common (26%) is unauthorized access to personal data of citizens. Last year, law enforcement officers opened 6.5 thousand criminal cases on the fact of such offenses. Fraud in online purchases of services (5.5 thousand) and goods (5.2 thousand) is also "popular". Kazakhstanis who wanted to apply for an online loan and were deceived often turn to law enforcement agencies (3.9 thousand).

The damage from online fraud is enormous and is not yet comparable with the amount of funds that the anti-fraud center managed to block in six months. Thus, according to data for January-December last year, victims gave online fraudsters 11.4 billion tenge – 2.8 times more than in 2023. Most of the victims of such criminals were individuals, they transferred 11 billion tenge to the violators. Among the victims, there are also legal entities (they lost 385 million tenge) and even government organizations (8.4 million tenge). Compensation for damages was relatively small: only 36.6%. That is, two thirds of the total amount of funds, or more than 7 billion tenge, were not returned to the owners.