The owners of the bookmaker Pin-Up — Russian citizen Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina — have been placed on the international wanted list in Kazakhstan. According to the Agency for Financial Monitoring (AFM), they are the main organisers of the operation of an illegal online casino on the territory of the country.
WHAT IS KNOWN
As journalist Mikhail Kozachkov writes in his Telegram channel “Kozachkov offside”, the cards of Punin and Ilyina have appeared in the wanted database on the Portal of Legal Statistics Bodies of the Prosecutor General's Office. Both are on the international wanted list.
The couple live in Cyprus. According to the AFM, they are linked to the organisation of an illegal gambling business in Kazakhstan. Thus, the investigation has reached the owners of the very platform around which law enforcement agencies have for a long time been establishing the roles of other participants.
HOW THE PIN-UP CASE DEVELOPED
FBRK wrote about this story back in February 2026. At that time the AFM placed Dmitry Druzhinsky and Marina Levkovich (Ginzburg) on the wanted list. According to the investigation's version, they coordinated the operation of online casinos under the brands Pin-Up and PINCO through a number of affiliated companies, including Bonami LLP and the payment aggregators Gold Pay LLP and Cyber Pay LLP, and also interacted with intermediaries and participated in the creation of payment infrastructure.
Other participants gradually surfaced in this story as well: Kazakhstani specialists from the financial and IT spheres, companies that provided payment processing, as well as bloggers who promoted gaming services.
More than 106.5 billion tenge passed through the payment infrastructure that, according to some media outlets, was built by Ilyas Karimov. It is claimed that these funds passed through fintech companies and acquiring channels, and were then converted into cryptocurrency through the Intebix exchange and withdrawn outside Kazakhstan.
HOW PIN-UP COMPLAINED ABOUT THE FBRK PUBLICATION
On 25 June 2026, Pin-Up attempted to secure the removal of the FBRK publication. The editorial team received a DMCA complaint through Cloudflare, in which the brand itself was designated as the “original work” whose copyright the publication had allegedly infringed. After the notification, the hosting provider temporarily restricted access to the site. The pretext, in all likelihood, was FBRK's material about the wanted status of Druzhinsky and Levkovich, prepared on the basis of an AFM press release.
Later the editorial team received materials that pointed to possible attempts at further pressure on FBRK. The publication obtained internal correspondence, some of whose messages could belong to Ilyas Karimov — a Russian citizen whom the media described as an intermediary connected with the operational activity and the organisation of Pin-Up's payment schemes in Kazakhstan.
The correspondence, in particular, contained messages with threats of a personal nature directed at FBRK founder Kirill Pavlov.
