Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych: where have they run off to and who stands behind them?

Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych: where have they run off to and who stands behind them?

The story of Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych is not just another plot about online casinos, crypto, and payment services. It is already nearly a ready-made detective series: an international manhunt, a billion dollars, dozens of searches, a sportsbook license used as a smokescreen, an American passport, Ukrainian origins, Russian connections, and very tense attempts to sanitize the internet.

Kazakh investigators assert that huge sums were moved out of the country under the guise of legitimate sportsbook activity through infrastructure linked to the Pin-Up and Pinco brands. At the center of the scheme were US citizen Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Ukrainian citizen Maryna Levkovych (Ginzburg), who were placed on an international wanted list at the beginning of the year.

But the most interesting thing in this story is not the scale of the money. It is how the world of online betting intertwined former post-Soviet gambling industry insiders, crypto processing, offshore structures, Ukrainian and Russian connections, and the traditional magic of these schemes: 'we didn’t organize anything, we just provided a service'.

At the same time, a significant portion of publications concerning the case come from Kazakh official notices or from so-called leak sites and investigative portals. Therefore, part of the information demands cautious handling and has not yet been confirmed by court decisions, making it difficult to form a fully accurate picture.

Why Kazakhstan?

The official part of the story was voiced by the Financial Monitoring Agency of Kazakhstan (FMA). According to the investigation, under the guise of a legal sportsbook business, a network of illegal online casinos operating under the Pin-Up and Pinco brands functioned in the country.

A key element of the scheme, according to investigators, was LLC Bonami, which received an official betting license in Kazakhstan. Formally — a legal betting market. In reality, as the FMA believes, it was an infrastructure for servicing online gambling and moving money abroad.

The investigation states that clients’ money was initially accumulated on transit accounts, then passed through payment companies Gold Pay and Cyber Pay (later renamed Pinnacle Financial Solutions), and then converted into cryptocurrency. According to Kazakh law enforcement, more than a billion dollars could have been moved through this system. In January 2026 of Druzhynskyi and Levkovych were placed on the international wanted list, and later a court authorized their extradited arrest.

Kazakhstan has long been one of the key markets for post-Soviet gambling business. After tighter regulation, Kazakhstan turned out to be a convenient platform: relatively liberal market, active development of electronic payments, high interest in online bets, and the possibility to work through a network of intermediaries.

According to Kazakh media and investigative publications, Druzhynskyi and Levkovych were engaged specifically in organizing the payment infrastructure — not so much the casinos themselves, but the most important element of any gambling business: moving money. This is at a level beyond simple 'IT people'; they are financial coordinators.

From open publications, Maryna Levkovych also appeared under the surname Ginzburg. Dmitro Druzhynskyi is described in a number of publications as a US citizen of Ukrainian origin. Some materials mention that he may have been involved in underground gambling stories even before the Kazakh case. However, these data require additional verification.

How the scheme worked: murky traces

Another interesting point: the entire structure did not resemble a classic casino, but a hybrid of fintech, a crypto-exchange, and a payment gateway. Therefore, investigators pay attention not only to the bookmaker but also to financial intermediaries.

If you assemble official FMA statements and investigative publications, the scheme looked roughly as follows: a user deposits money through a formally legitimate sportsbook infrastructure. After that, funds pass through a chain of payment companies, with payment purposes masked as legitimate operations. Then the money is split and moved through cryptocurrency channels. Then funds are withdrawn outside Kazakhstan.

Precisely at the processing stage, structures like Gold Pay, Cyber Pay, and Pinnacle Financial Solutions emerged. For a classic illegal casino, this is nearly an ideal model: formally you have a license and a payment service, but in fact — an international machine for moving money.

This is where the murkier part of the story begins. There are no direct legally confirmed proofs that the scheme was run from Russia or by Russian structures at this time. However, several factors force a careful look in that direction.

First, the Pin-Up brand itself has long operated in the markets of the former USSR and is traditionally associated with the Russian-speaking segment of gambling.

Second, similar high-risk processing schemes historically were built through a network of companies connected to Russian and offshore markets simultaneously. After 2022 year, a significant portion of such structures began to actively migrate to Kazakhstan, Armenia, Cyprus, UAE, and other jurisdictions.

Third, in publications of several investigative outlets there are hints of ties between certain participants and influential people from Russia’s financial-political circles, who in the last five years have actively 'cornered' Kazakhstan. And the business logic itself shows that without serious political and banking 'cover', such operations worth billions cannot exist.

Because this is not about an underground casino in a basement. These are transactions through banks, licensed payment structures, crypto-exchanges, international transfers, and mass advertising infrastructure. Such schemes usually live as long as someone above benefits from pretending nothing unusual is happening.

The Ukrainian direction in this story looks no less sensitive, though overall it also leads to Russia. After gambling business was legalized in Ukraine, it became one of the region’s largest online betting markets. Around it, the payment services industry, affiliated networks, and marketing agencies quickly grew. Even at the time of adopting the corresponding law in Ukraine there were many publications claiming that Russians, who needed a legal platform, would push this decision and that they had capital and influence over Ukrainian authorities.

Moreover, Pin-Up’s work in Ukraine sparked a huge scandal because it turned out that the brand is closely tied to Russia. In connection with this scandal and amid the ongoing full-scale war, part of the market began moving operations to safer jurisdictions — primarily Kazakhstan and the UAE.

That is why Ukrainian surnames, managers, and companies associated with former participants of the local gambling market constantly surface in investigative materials. The problem is that gambling business in the post-Soviet space has long existed as a single ecosystem without clear national borders. Today a payment operator may be registered in Almaty, owners living in Dubai, development in Kyiv, marketing through Cyprus, and money moving through crypto and ending up somewhere unknown.

Druzhynskyi and Levkovych — who stands behind them?

Regarding the scandal’s heroes — Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych, there is also another intriguing question: where did they vanish to? And the exact answer to this question remains unknown. Kazakhstan placed both on the international wanted list, but there is no information about their detention.

Investigative publications suggest that the defendants may have left Kazakhstan long before the active phase of the investigation and moved to one of the jurisdictions traditionally popular among gambling structures — UAE, Cyprus, or Eastern European countries.

There is one more important nuance in the Druzhynskyi and Levkovych manhunt — in the last weeks several sites wrote about attempts to mass-delete publications about their case from search results and public access.

This fact alone does not prove anything. But in the world of gray gambling, this is considered almost a mandatory crisis-management procedure. First, a flood of publications is launched. Then a flood of deletions begins. Then new companies and new brands appear. And very often the same people continue to operate — just under a different name.

One can suppose that Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych will weather the storm and obtain guarantees that the case will be shelved. But for that to happen, the scandal must subside and publications about their involvement in the fraud must disappear. From this two conclusions follow: someone truly influential is behind the pair, and the services of Druzhynskyi and Levkovych are urgently needed by that person or those people.

And therefore the main question of this story is not Druzhynskyi and Levkovych. People of that level are usually not the ultimate beneficiaries; they are operators: they build infrastructure, strike deals with banks, ensure processing, sort out licensing issues.

And billions in flows they control never belong exclusively to managers. That is why the Pin-Up case in Kazakhstan looks so sensitive. If investigators really reach the ultimate beneficiaries, we may be talking about a transnational network involving financial, cryptocurrency, and gambling figures from several countries.

Most investigative writers name the Pin-Up owner Dmitro Punin as the scheme’s beneficiary, but is that really the case? The point is that there was a flood of investigations in which it was claimed that influential persons from both Russia and Ukraine stood behind Punin. So there is no answer to who the real beneficiary of the scheme is.

For now, the public picture looks as follows: Kazakh authorities show a harsh reaction. The defendants are on the run. Information about the case continues to appear in waves. Investigative outlets and dubious-reputation platforms are actively covering it. At the same time, there is a mass cleanup of negative material about Druzhynskyi and Levkovych.

And this usually means one thing: the fight is not only in court but also behind the scenes of justice and the public process. How this will end remains unclear. On the one hand, campaigns to clean up material are matched by another, no less large one — new materials with new details appear after deletions. That means there are other forces at work besides those backing Druzhynskyi and Levkovych.

In general, the Dmitro Druzhynskyi and Maryna Levkovych story is a very modern post-Soviet plot. There are no suitcases of cash and secret casinos in hotels as in the nineties.

There is crypto. There are payment gateways. There is a sportsbook license as an official facade. There is an international network of companies. There are people with several jurisdictions and passports. And there is enormous money that disappears faster than court decisions appear.

And there is one main question that remains unanswered: who was the true owner of this system. Because in such stories, the organizers of processing are rarely the final link.