Kazakhstan’s AFM sends Vavada cash-in cash-out case to court after offline office in Karaganda moved about $940k through 23 bank accounts

Kazakhstan’s Financial Monitoring Agency (AFM) has sent a criminal case to court against two people who handled deposits and withdrawals for the offshore iGaming product Vavada. For high-risk PSPs, the detail that matters is not just the offshore brand: the operators, the office, the bank accounts, and the players were all in Kazakhstan, which makes the payment trail much easier to unwind.

1. The scheme ran through an offline office in Karaganda, where hired operators were placed on shifts and processed deposits and withdrawals 24/7. In other words, this was not some remote shell setup; it was a local cash-in cash-out desk with a physical footprint.
2. According to the AFM press release, the two defendants used 23 bank accounts opened in the names of nominal holders, or “drops.” One of the defendants also personally recruited those drops, which is the kind of operational detail investigators tend to love because it ties the payment flow to a human organizer.
3. About $940k passed through the drop accounts before the arrangement unraveled. The scheme started in January 2026 and collapsed a few months later.
4. The core takeaway for PSPs and acquiring teams is straightforward: when organizers, operators, drops, and players are all in the same geography, and the whole thing is routed through an on-the-ground office, the mechanism is not especially hard to trace once the regulator starts pulling on the thread.