Kazakhstan banks blocked 402,000 gambling-related payment transactions worth more than 10 billion tenge

Kazakhstan’s prime minister said banks blocked 402,000 payment operations worth more than 10 billion tenge ($20.9 million) linked to grey gambling. For PSPs, the useful part is not the headline number itself; it is the state-level blocking apparatus now sitting between banks and 110 popular payment providers.

1. The data covers six months, from October 2025 to March 2026. During that period, Kazakh banks added 110 popular payment providers to their black list, and transfers to those providers are now blocked by banks.
2. Since the start of 2026, law enforcement has opened 15 criminal cases covering 40 facts of online casino organization. Authorities also detained 11 executives and employees of financial organizations and blocked 1,144 drop cards.
3. The enforcement side has also moved online at scale. In 2024, authorities blocked more than 20,000 internet resources; in 2025, that figure rose to 75,000. In the first five months of 2026 alone, access to another 62,000 sites was restricted.
4. Of those 62,000 sites, 34,000 were identified by the Unified Accounting System (Ediinaya sistema ucheta, ESU). That matters because it shows site blocking is not just complaint-driven cleanup; it is being fed by a centralized detection system.

For high-risk payment teams, the operational takeaway is straightforward: Kazakhstan is combining bank-side transaction blocking, provider blacklisting, criminal cases, and site takedowns. That is the sort of setup that tends to turn gambling-related processing into a compliance and continuity problem, not just a chargeback problem.