Kazakhstan puts Pin-Up-linked Dmitry Punin and Marina Ilina on wanted list

Kazakhstan's Agency for Financial Monitoring (AFM) has opened wanted cases against Dmitry Punin and Marina Ilina (also spelled Ilyina) in its criminal investigation into the Pin-Up and Pinco online casino brands.

According to wanted notices published on the legal statistics portal of Kazakhstan's Prosecutor General's Office, the cases were registered on October 30, 2026. The AFM is listed as the initiating agency, and the search is being carried out by its Department of Economic Investigations for Astana, as reported by state news agency Kazinform. The notices give Punin's date of birth as February 8, 1985, and Ilina's as February 11, 1989.

Ilina is publicly identified as CEO and owner of PIN-UP Global, the Cyprus-headquartered group behind the Pin-Up brand, and Kazakh media describe Punin as her husband. In August 2026, the AFM told Tengrinews that Punin and Ilina had been named suspects in the same case, without saying what role each is alleged to have played.

How Kazakhstan says the Pin-Up scheme worked

The case became public in February 2026, when the AFM put two other people on a wanted list: Dmitry Druzhinsky, a US citizen, and Marina Levkovich (Ginzburg), a Ukrainian citizen. A court approved their detention in absentia.

According to the AFM, the online casinos operating under the PIN-UP and PINCO brands were organised by a group acting from outside Kazakhstan through a network of affiliated companies. Druzhinsky and Levkovich allegedly acted as coordinators, recruiting accomplices, dealing with payment companies and second-tier banks, and building the payment infrastructure used to take in and pay out money.

The AFM says a local company, Bonami LLP, obtained a state licence for bookmaking under the PIN-UP.KZ brand to disguise the activity. Payment organisations including Gold Pay LLP and Cyber Pay LLP, later renamed Pinnacle Financial Solutions LLP, allegedly served as payment aggregators for the online casinos. Online casinos are not permitted in Kazakhstan. Player funds were collected in transit accounts and then converted into cryptocurrency through affiliated companies holding electronic money licences, the agency said.

In the same case, Kazakh blogger Kaisar Kamza was extradited from Vietnam on August 6, 2026, on suspicion of aiding an unlicensed online casino by advertising it to Kazakh users, the AFM said in its August reply to Tengrinews.

A separate case: Nomadgames and Sultangames

On October 29, 2026, the AFM's Astana department said it had completed its investigation into a group that kept the Nomadgames and Sultangames online casinos and their mirror sites running. According to the agency, bank employees connected payment infrastructure, signed contracts without mandatory checks and assigned matching MCC codes to internet terminals, so that payments looked like legal bookmaking and other business activity.

Transactions through the terminals exceeded 188 billion tenge, the AFM said. A controlled company received 10 billion tenge under a sham contract, and the money was converted into cryptocurrency and sent to the suspects' wallets, with digital asset transfers totalling 19 million USDT. Three apartments, six cars, crypto assets and bank funds of 1.4 billion tenge have been frozen with court approval.

No charges in either case have been tested in court. Punin, Ilina and PIN-UP Global have not publicly responded to the wanted notices.

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