On the morning of 25 June, the FBRK received a DMCA complaint via Cloudflare - it was filed in connection with material about the case of the Pin-Up and Pinco casinos, the organisers of which are accused of illegal gambling and the removal of more than $1 billion from Kazakhstan.
HOW THE COMPLAINT WAS FILED
Early in the morning of 25 June, the FBRK's hosting provider received a notification from Cloudflare regarding a complaint under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
The 'original work' allegedly infringed by the publication is listed in the complaint as PIN-UP. The site became inaccessible: the hosting provider responded to the notification, and fbrk.kz stopped opening for readers. By the time of publication of this material, the editorial team had restored the resource's operation.
DMCA complaints are a common tool for putting pressure on unfavourable publications: it is enough to send a formal notification of 'copyright infringement' to the provider, and the host is obliged to respond, otherwise it risks its own liability. The complaint can be challenged by filing a counter-notification, but this takes time.
FOR WHICH MATERIAL
The reason for the complaint, apparently, was an FBRK publication about the case of the Pin-Up and Pinco casinos. The material, prepared based on data from the Financial Monitoring Agency (AFM), reported that the agency had put two foreign citizens on the wanted list, suspected of coordinating the activities of an illegal online casino in Kazakhstan.
According to the investigation, Dmitry Druzhinsky (a US citizen, 55 years old) and Marina Levkovich (Ginzburg) (a citizen of Ukraine, 40 years old) acted as coordinators: they recruited accomplices, interacted with payment organisations and second-tier banks, and also participated in creating payment infrastructure. To legalise the activity, the limited liability partnership 'Bonami' was registered, which received a licence for bookmaking activities under the Pin-UP-KZ brand.
WHAT IS KNOWN ABOUT THE CASE
According to the Telegram channel 'Payment Shield in the CIS', the volume of illegal transactions exceeded 600 billion tenge (approximately $1.2 billion). The scheme involved representatives from more than 35 payment companies, top managers from four banks and Kazpost. Security forces conducted over 70 searches, and more than 250 people are named in the case.
In February 2026, Druzhinsky and Levkovich were arrested in absentia. Deputy Prosecutor General Galymzhan Koigeldiev stated that if they cannot be extradited, the international principle of 'extradite or prosecute' would be applied. After this, publications about the arrests on Ukrainian websites began to disappear en masse - the source linked this to a deliberate purge of the information space.
According to the same channel on 1 June, a Kazakhstani court initiated the extradition procedure for Levkovich. She is charged with organising an illegal gambling business - the penalty provides for 4 to 7 years with confiscation of property. In addition to the Pin-Up case, the court named her as the general director of Favbet.
Later, the channel reported on the identification of another figure - a Russian citizen, Ilyas Karimov, who, according to the source, was involved in operational support, advertising promotion, and payment schemes for Pin-Up in Kazakhstan. The source describes him as a key intermediary who posed as a lawyer and an assistant to the Russian ambassador.
According to data from 'Payment Shield in the CIS' on 20 June, Karimov was assisted in the technical part by Rustam Iskindirov, co-founder of the companies Prime Agency and Qubit IT Agency. It is reported that at the end of December 2025, Karimov presumably transferred between $5 and $10 million to Germany via a cryptocurrency wallet.
AN ATTEMPT TO SILENCE THE PUBLICATION
The use of the DMCA mechanism against journalistic materials is nothing new for the Kazakhstani media space. Formally, the complaint cites copyright infringement; however, in this case, the subject of the FBRK's publication was information from an official source - an AFM press release.
The editorial team has restored the site's operation. Currently fbrk.kz is operating normally.