Kazakhtelecom, the Prosecutor’s Office of Almaty, and Kcell are “just saying no” to phone fraud.  

Public-private partnerships stop fraud 

Kazakhtelecom and Kcell’s anti-fraud systems detected more than 5,000 fraudulent calls involving international spoofing calls to local Kazakhstani numbers. The Prosecutor’s Office of Almaty investigated and discovered four sim-box devices used to generate the calls. 

Over 11 months in 2023-2024, anti-fraud measures went on to block more than 5 million fraudulent calls. Handling fraud incidents is a 24/7 affair. “When a subscriber reports fraud, Kazakhtelecom analyzes traffic and sets new blocking rules to prevent the crime from repeating,” noted Dmitry Tyrtyshny, Managing Director of Information Security at JSC Kazakhtelecom. 

In 2023, more than 900 citizens reported phone fraud valued at a total loss of 1.9 billion tenge. Since the system was put in place, not a single resident of Kazakhstan has fallen victim to fraud. Fraudsters outside Kazakhstan using IP and SIP telephony cannot reach Kazakh landlines, due to the system that blocks them. Between January and March 2024, more than 2 million such calls were blocked.  

Kazakhtelecom works with international operators to identify the sources of these calls. These are small transit operators registered in the Baltics, Hong Kong, Cyprus, and the UK, whose employees and leaders are citizens of the post-Soviet space. 

Moving targets

As fraudulent landline calls are blocked, criminals have turned to WhatsApp and Telegram to reach citizens.