The number of drug crimes in Kazakhstan is growing every year. Prisons are full of pawnbrokers and warners, and rehabilitation centers are full of young people who are heavily addicted to synthetic drugs. At the same time, the organizers of drug shops easily evade responsibility and continue their activities online. Kazakh hackers from the KazHack group are trying to change the situation.For example, for several years they have been disclosing the activities of drug traffickers, while remaining anonymous. In their work, they use methods that are often on the verge of the law. Read more about the "gray" hackers, their methods, and why they also took on pedophiles-in the article Orda.kz.
Why did you start fighting drug dealers and drug marketplaces? How long have you been doing this?
— We started thinking about the problems with drugs in our country about four years ago. Every day, walking around the city, we constantly encountered inscriptions on the walls advertising drug shops. Usually ordinary people don't notice them, but once you see them, you start noticing them all the time. Even in playgrounds and schools. In addition, we suddenly realized that each of us has a relative or close person who has suffered from drugs. Someone got hooked on them and went through life, and someone became a pawnbroker himself, trying to solve their financial problems in a quick way,but instead ended up in prison and will not be released very soon...
Watching all this every day, we saw a growing threat that is growing more and more in our country. When you realize that you can at least change something, you just don't have the strength to stand on the sidelines.
Tell us about your team. How many people are there and how are you organized?
— For four years, our team was constantly changing — new people came, some left. Moreover, we have many assistants who are not part of our team, but regularly provide some kind of support. As for the main core of our team, it is five or seven people at the moment.
How does your fight against online crime affect your professional life outside of this activity? Have you ever encountered problems at work because of this?
— Of course, the biggest influence is time. It is always not enough, because each of us has a personal life, work. Someone is a freelancer by himself, and it is easier for him, and someone works on a schedule and can only devote time to our activities in the evenings. It is very difficult to combine this, but it is necessary. No one experienced any serious problems at work, because we try to ensure that our fight against drugs does not overlap in any way with other activities, primarily for security reasons.
Are you not afraid for your own safety and the safety of your loved ones?
— Of course, some fear is always present. After all, we are well aware that our enemies have great financial capabilities, great connections, including in the law enforcement agencies. If we can find them, even those who are very careful about their anonymity, then what is stopping them from reaching out to us sooner or later? We always keep this in mind and try to always put our safety first, because otherwise it can lead to big troubles, including for our relatives.
Were there any cases when the drug mafia tried to track down someone from your team?
— Over the past year, we have repeatedly witnessed various attempts to deanonymize us. Most of the methods are perfectly familiar to us, and we immediately see them. But sometimes they go to tricks, enter into correspondence with us, try to ingratiate themselves with us, disguise themselves as representatives of the authorities in order to get information out of us. However, we always pay maximum attention to everyone we come in contact with and try not to fall for their tricks.
Again, for security reasons, we try to tell our surroundings as little as possible about what we are doing. Only a few of our guys decided to open up to their close relatives. Of course, they support them, although they are very afraid that our activities may eventually lead to sad consequences... Therefore, it is still better not to share at all with anyone but "your own". This way we can protect both ourselves and our loved ones.
How many drug marketplaces operate in Kazakhstan, and how do they evade blocking?
— It is impossible to name the exact number, but it is thousands. And literally every day in some city opens a new drug shop. Of course, not all of them achieve success and remain in the drug scene, but the huge demand for drugs, which only continues to grow, encourages more and more shops to open. They usually sell on Telegram.
Sometimes their chats and bots are blocked by the administration, but this only causes a small financial loss. Very soon, they create new ones and quickly win back old customers. Blocking bank cards that accept payments for drugs is more effective. Here the damage is already more significant. Although more or less large shops try to withdraw all funds from their public cards on a daily basis: if you are lucky, you can make them lose a couple of hundred thousand, or even a million tenge.
But this only creates a certain headache or delays in salary for a couple of days. Unfortunately, there are no effective mass blocking of Telegram channels or cards yet. However, we also thought about this issue and methods that will help improve this option of dealing with drug shops. We may be able to provide such a tool in the future.
Have there ever been cases when warring drug shops tried to use you in their war?
— Yes, this happens regularly. A significant part of our work is processing the drains that we receive from our subscribers. Often it can be people who accidentally learned some data on drug dealers from friends or, for example, recorded the pawnbroker on camera. But most often, of course, our informants are the same criminals that we are working against. They want to get rid of their competitors and leak them to us. We even had a case when almost simultaneously two warring stores began to leak information about each other, and now they are both being studied by law enforcement agencies. In principle, we are not against such cases, no matter what the informant's goal is, the main thing is strike at drugs. And who of them will be earlier and who will be later, this is not so critical.
Have you noticed that criminals have become more cautious online because of your activities?
— We try to monitor the correspondence in all popular drug chats. Recently, almost every day, a discussion of our channel pops up somewhere. Hucksters directly threaten to merge each other with us, discuss our posts and try to guess what their "colleague" has miscalculated and how to prevent such a mistake themselves. However, we did not observe such a massive increase in our anonymity directly. Those who are smarter, they tried to keep their heads down before us, and the rest of us are still not particularly worried.
Will this make the work of law enforcement agencies more difficult?
That is why we try to use our capabilities in cooperation with the police to combine their methods with ours. I am glad that the development in the organs is still there. For example, relatively recently, a cyberpole has appeared in our country, where employees are not just police officers, but technical specialists. But it is necessary, of course, to develop this and gain experience.
So you cooperate with the police?
— Now we see how the number of law enforcement officers who independently contact us is growing. This is not only UPN, but also the National Security Committee, Cyberpol, and AFM. This suggests that we have finally been able to prove that we are not only willing, but also able to support them effectively.
But that wasn't always the case. In general, of course, from the very beginning we tried to establish contacts with the police. But for the first couple of years, it didn't give any results at all. And only a year and a half ago, employees who really want to work with us began to appear. I am very happy that there are those who care about their own work and who do it not for the sake of a tick, but sincerely rejoice in their work.
In general, we have only recently been able to enlist contacts from the authorities in most regions of Kazakhstan. But there are still regions where we don't have anyone to pass on information to. We very much hope that the situation will start to improve in the near future, at least we see this trend. As for the effectiveness of their struggle, if we take exactly those with whom we communicate, then we can evaluate many of them very positively. Of course, there are those who are not very willing to get in touch, just want to get information from us, and not work on it together and without feedback. Someone, apparently, was simply instructed to contact us, he did it, checked in and forgot. But there aren't many of them.
If we talk about efficiency in general, it is actually difficult to assess it. After all, on the one hand, we see an absolute increase in drugs, tens of thousands of criminals have super-confidence in their own impunity. But, on the other hand, we can't see exactly what kind of work the police are doing. Since we began to actively communicate with them, they began to share their everyday life with us. We see that many people do not sit idle, they constantly cover laboratories, intercept hundreds of kilograms of drugs, and not all such operations are reported in the media. The more we study this problem from the inside, the more we see how deeply it is embedded in our country and how difficult it will be to deal with it.
Did the police try to uncover you?
— When we first started attracting attention, it was very depressing that instead of fruitful cooperation, we were treated like criminals. We tried to contact the police, get in touch with them, give them information, but they still tried their best to focus on getting us to meet them, to determine where we live. Of course, someone is still trying, that's their job. Therefore, we have to hide not only from drug shops, but also from law enforcement officials.
What is your greatest achievement in hacktivism? Can you share your case?
— It is difficult to single out a single case. Perhaps the most important thing is that we were able to develop our movement and draw attention to this problem. We can share one funny case that we haven't written about anywhere else. We managed to completely stop the work of one drug shop, without putting absolutely no effort at all. Once a stranger contacted us and told us that he realized that we were sitting on his tail and were about to figure it out. The funny thing is, we had no idea who it was. But we played along with him, gave him a couple of hints, and he was finally convinced that we supposedly figured him out. As a result, he promised to withdraw from the case, deleted the channel and chats of his store, and told what legal activities he would engage in.
Subsequently, we were able to understand exactly who he really is, and were able to monitor whether he does not return back to the slippery slope. Why did he think that we were on his tail and how did he suddenly decide to "give up"? Maybe it was just the fear of being found. And this is the most important thing that our movement does. After all, previously they were almost sure that they could not be found or imprisoned, especially those who are not directly related to drugs, do not concern them. Therefore, there was no fear of doing all this. Now, anyone who is familiar with our activities will think twice and weigh all the pros and cons before making a decision to start selling drugs.
You publish personal data of suspects, which causes disputes among your subscribers and users of Kaznet. Is this approach ethical?
— We believe that it is the publication of personal data that has the maximum effect. And there are many advantages here. First, even if the case suddenly does not reach the best ending — the conclusion of the criminal behind bars, there is a high probability that he will lie down on the bottom and stop selling drugs. After all, now his relatives, parents and friends know about it, who can apply the right pressure. This has already happened in practice and repeatedly.
Secondly, such publicity allows you to avoid those slippery moments that are not uncommon in our country — criminals can buy off. After all, even if we pass on all the information to a reliable employee, whom we fully trust, and then he carries out surveillance and detention, then other employees, judges, prosecutors, who can easily influence the course of the case, go further. And when there is publicity, it is much more difficult to do it. Few werewolves in uniform will want to read in our posts about the huckster, which we identified, and then he miraculously got out of it.
In addition, it is the publicity that allows us to attract more attention to our movement.
We have new subscribers-and these are new sources of useful information, new assistants. If we hadn't done everything publicly, we wouldn't have been able to do it, and many of those who are now behind bars would still be at large.
Do your activities always comply with the law, or do you often operate in a gray area?
— Even the publication of personal data is not always legitimate. Therefore, we try to use various methods, mainly OSINT-that is, searching for data in public sources, various merged databases, and leaks. We often have to resort to social engineering, which is when we pull out useful information in our correspondence. All this is somewhere on the edge.
By the way, do your subscribers help you fight the drug mafia?
— As for the help of subscribers, we receive it regularly. Previously, we had to find our own goals for our work — we would go through chats, walk around the city and take pictures of advertising signs. Now this is not necessary at all, almost every day we are sent more and more new lists of sellers and recruiters who are trying to attract mortgagees to work. Moreover, many of our subscribers have become active and started their own fight against drugs — they paint over the signs in their city, take a closer look at suspicious individuals, and send us photos and videos of the pawnbrokers. Those who have technical skills can help us solve many issues that would require additional time — such as writing scripts and maintaining some of our services. I am very happy that there are more and more such assistants every time.
Why do many young people become pawnbrokers and breeders? They don't understand the consequences?
— Of course, first of all, in our opinion, this is still an imaginary anonymity. They believe that if they work through the Internet, no one will ever be able to find and track them down.
As a result, mortgagees and small dealers are always in debt, despite the huge income.
They can't quit their job because they don't see any other way to get out of this mess. Those who are bigger and with much higher incomes do not see any obstacles at all. They believe that they will never be caught and punished by justice if they hold leadership positions and do not deal with drugs. In general, now it's too easy and simple, anyone can become a pawnbroker.
We even had a case where the courier was a person with a wheelchair disability. Perhaps no one would ever have guessed what he does during his walks if it weren't for us. The only way to stabilize the situation is to raise the level of detection of these crimes, to discourage those who are still thinking about it. As for how to incriminate your loved one in connection with the drug mafia, we are now actively working on this issue. We are creating a tool that will make it much easier for police officers, as well as parents or close friends, to find both employees of drug shops and drug addicts themselves. We hope that we will be able to announce it in the near future.
How does recruitment work? Do people look for such jobs themselves, or do they go out for them?
— Most often, these are spam mailings in Telegram groups related to job search. Then there are OLX and street advertising. We had several posts where we exposed ad placemakers in different cities of Kazakhstan who were looking for pawnbrokers under the guise of legal work. But it happens that they write in plain text who they need and for what purposes. This is what concerns pawnbrokers, the exchange resource of drug shops. More responsible positions, such as managers, operators, are most often chosen from already familiar, reliable people who were able to somehow prove themselves or were able to give a good deposit in the amount of 500 thousand to three million tenge.
Now you've switched to pedophiles. Are you going to expose them as publicly as you do drug dealers?
— While we are only studying this topic, although many methods are similar, there are a significant number of nuances that we are not yet prepared for, and it takes considerable time to understand how to properly build work in this direction. But yes, we plan to de-ban pedophiles in parallel. Now it is still very important to establish contacts with law enforcement agencies that can help us in these matters.
Here, as it turned out, everything is much more complicated — we do not have a special body that could deal specifically with these problems. I think it will take a couple of months before we can think things through properly and figure out how to move forward. But what is certain is that we will publish their personal data in the same way as with drug shops. We believe that this is even more important, because these people can pose the greatest danger to our society, threatening the most valuable thing that we have.
Don't you worry that this approach may provoke situations where suspects may harm themselves or others?
— We have repeatedly considered these issues. Before publishing the data, if a person has not yet been detained by the police, we try to think carefully and weigh everything, predict all possible outcomes. Of course, you can't foresee everything, but so far there have been no such incidents and I hope there won't be any.
How accessible is such content in Kaznet and are the authorized bodies actively fighting it? How do pedophiles work online, and how can parents protect their child?
And they fight it, as it seems to us, much worse than with drugs, if at all specifically somehow work in this direction. For us, this is a completely new topic and not everything is clear about the situation as a whole. We have already witnessed how pedophiles enter into correspondence with children under 15 years of age, try to get acquainted with them and invite them to a meeting. By the way, this is also common in the drug industry.
Unfortunately, among the clients there are very young teenagers who are ready to go to a meeting with an unknown person for the promise of a dose. To protect their children, we believe that parents can only do one thing — establish a trusting relationship with their child. Ask them what their hobbies are and what friends they have. We don't say that you need to follow up, but you should definitely show interest. And only through a trusting two-way relationship can you protect your child from bad influences, be it pedophiles, drugs or any other troubles.
In your opinion, is it possible to completely clear Kaznet of illegal content and drugs?
"Of course not. It's like dreaming of a perfect world. Kaznet will be able to completely clear itself only when it is replaced by a more convenient and suitable tool for absorbing this content. All we can do is minimize the availability of this content and make it more difficult to access, while trying not to harm the comfort of using it for legal purposes.
How do you assess the security of personal data in our country? What shortcomings and omissions do you see on the part of government agencies and businesses?
— All these plums are a side effect of everyone's favorite digitalization.
Therefore, you should always remember that any information that you leave on the Internet, sooner or later an attacker can get it.
We are not saying that you should give up all these benefits, you just need to understand and always keep in mind the idea that your personal data may become known to everyone. To combat leaks, we believe that it is necessary to increase the responsibility of those responsible for these leaks. Right now, the best thing that can happen is that you will just be announced about the fact itself, and that's it. But no one will be punished. In fact, companies that have made this kind of mistake should face very severe penalties in the form of fines, and those that will seriously hit their business. This is the only way to make them more or less carefully monitor the data that our citizens have entrusted to them.
Why did you start fighting drug dealers and drug marketplaces? How long have you been doing this?
— We started thinking about the problems with drugs in our country about four years ago. Every day, walking around the city, we constantly encountered inscriptions on the walls advertising drug shops. Usually ordinary people don't notice them, but once you see them, you start noticing them all the time. Even in playgrounds and schools. In addition, we suddenly realized that each of us has a relative or close person who has suffered from drugs. Someone got hooked on them and went through life, and someone became a pawnbroker himself, trying to solve their financial problems in a quick way,but instead ended up in prison and will not be released very soon...
Watching all this every day, we saw a growing threat that is growing more and more in our country. When you realize that you can at least change something, you just don't have the strength to stand on the sidelines.
Tell us about your team. How many people are there and how are you organized?
— For four years, our team was constantly changing — new people came, some left. Moreover, we have many assistants who are not part of our team, but regularly provide some kind of support. As for the main core of our team, it is five or seven people at the moment.
How does your fight against online crime affect your professional life outside of this activity? Have you ever encountered problems at work because of this?
— Of course, the biggest influence is time. It is always not enough, because each of us has a personal life, work. Someone is a freelancer by himself, and it is easier for him, and someone works on a schedule and can only devote time to our activities in the evenings. It is very difficult to combine this, but it is necessary. No one experienced any serious problems at work, because we try to ensure that our fight against drugs does not overlap in any way with other activities, primarily for security reasons.
Are you not afraid for your own safety and the safety of your loved ones?
— Of course, some fear is always present. After all, we are well aware that our enemies have great financial capabilities, great connections, including in the law enforcement agencies. If we can find them, even those who are very careful about their anonymity, then what is stopping them from reaching out to us sooner or later? We always keep this in mind and try to always put our safety first, because otherwise it can lead to big troubles, including for our relatives.
Were there any cases when the drug mafia tried to track down someone from your team?
— Over the past year, we have repeatedly witnessed various attempts to deanonymize us. Most of the methods are perfectly familiar to us, and we immediately see them. But sometimes they go to tricks, enter into correspondence with us, try to ingratiate themselves with us, disguise themselves as representatives of the authorities in order to get information out of us. However, we always pay maximum attention to everyone we come in contact with and try not to fall for their tricks.
Again, for security reasons, we try to tell our surroundings as little as possible about what we are doing. Only a few of our guys decided to open up to their close relatives. Of course, they support them, although they are very afraid that our activities may eventually lead to sad consequences... Therefore, it is still better not to share at all with anyone but "your own". This way we can protect both ourselves and our loved ones.
How many drug marketplaces operate in Kazakhstan, and how do they evade blocking?
— It is impossible to name the exact number, but it is thousands. And literally every day in some city opens a new drug shop. Of course, not all of them achieve success and remain in the drug scene, but the huge demand for drugs, which only continues to grow, encourages more and more shops to open. They usually sell on Telegram.
Sometimes their chats and bots are blocked by the administration, but this only causes a small financial loss. Very soon, they create new ones and quickly win back old customers. Blocking bank cards that accept payments for drugs is more effective. Here the damage is already more significant. Although more or less large shops try to withdraw all funds from their public cards on a daily basis: if you are lucky, you can make them lose a couple of hundred thousand, or even a million tenge.
But this only creates a certain headache or delays in salary for a couple of days. Unfortunately, there are no effective mass blocking of Telegram channels or cards yet. However, we also thought about this issue and methods that will help improve this option of dealing with drug shops. We may be able to provide such a tool in the future.
Have there ever been cases when warring drug shops tried to use you in their war?
— Yes, this happens regularly. A significant part of our work is processing the drains that we receive from our subscribers. Often it can be people who accidentally learned some data on drug dealers from friends or, for example, recorded the pawnbroker on camera. But most often, of course, our informants are the same criminals that we are working against. They want to get rid of their competitors and leak them to us. We even had a case when almost simultaneously two warring stores began to leak information about each other, and now they are both being studied by law enforcement agencies. In principle, we are not against such cases, no matter what the informant's goal is, the main thing is strike at drugs. And who of them will be earlier and who will be later, this is not so critical.
Have you noticed that criminals have become more cautious online because of your activities?
— We try to monitor the correspondence in all popular drug chats. Recently, almost every day, a discussion of our channel pops up somewhere. Hucksters directly threaten to merge each other with us, discuss our posts and try to guess what their "colleague" has miscalculated and how to prevent such a mistake themselves. However, we did not observe such a massive increase in our anonymity directly. Those who are smarter, they tried to keep their heads down before us, and the rest of us are still not particularly worried.
Will this make the work of law enforcement agencies more difficult?
That is why we try to use our capabilities in cooperation with the police to combine their methods with ours. I am glad that the development in the organs is still there. For example, relatively recently, a cyberpole has appeared in our country, where employees are not just police officers, but technical specialists. But it is necessary, of course, to develop this and gain experience.
So you cooperate with the police?
— Now we see how the number of law enforcement officers who independently contact us is growing. This is not only UPN, but also the National Security Committee, Cyberpol, and AFM. This suggests that we have finally been able to prove that we are not only willing, but also able to support them effectively.
But that wasn't always the case. In general, of course, from the very beginning we tried to establish contacts with the police. But for the first couple of years, it didn't give any results at all. And only a year and a half ago, employees who really want to work with us began to appear. I am very happy that there are those who care about their own work and who do it not for the sake of a tick, but sincerely rejoice in their work.
In general, we have only recently been able to enlist contacts from the authorities in most regions of Kazakhstan. But there are still regions where we don't have anyone to pass on information to. We very much hope that the situation will start to improve in the near future, at least we see this trend. As for the effectiveness of their struggle, if we take exactly those with whom we communicate, then we can evaluate many of them very positively. Of course, there are those who are not very willing to get in touch, just want to get information from us, and not work on it together and without feedback. Someone, apparently, was simply instructed to contact us, he did it, checked in and forgot. But there aren't many of them.
If we talk about efficiency in general, it is actually difficult to assess it. After all, on the one hand, we see an absolute increase in drugs, tens of thousands of criminals have super-confidence in their own impunity. But, on the other hand, we can't see exactly what kind of work the police are doing. Since we began to actively communicate with them, they began to share their everyday life with us. We see that many people do not sit idle, they constantly cover laboratories, intercept hundreds of kilograms of drugs, and not all such operations are reported in the media. The more we study this problem from the inside, the more we see how deeply it is embedded in our country and how difficult it will be to deal with it.
Did the police try to uncover you?
— When we first started attracting attention, it was very depressing that instead of fruitful cooperation, we were treated like criminals. We tried to contact the police, get in touch with them, give them information, but they still tried their best to focus on getting us to meet them, to determine where we live. Of course, someone is still trying, that's their job. Therefore, we have to hide not only from drug shops, but also from law enforcement officials.
What is your greatest achievement in hacktivism? Can you share your case?
— It is difficult to single out a single case. Perhaps the most important thing is that we were able to develop our movement and draw attention to this problem. We can share one funny case that we haven't written about anywhere else. We managed to completely stop the work of one drug shop, without putting absolutely no effort at all. Once a stranger contacted us and told us that he realized that we were sitting on his tail and were about to figure it out. The funny thing is, we had no idea who it was. But we played along with him, gave him a couple of hints, and he was finally convinced that we supposedly figured him out. As a result, he promised to withdraw from the case, deleted the channel and chats of his store, and told what legal activities he would engage in.
Subsequently, we were able to understand exactly who he really is, and were able to monitor whether he does not return back to the slippery slope. Why did he think that we were on his tail and how did he suddenly decide to "give up"? Maybe it was just the fear of being found. And this is the most important thing that our movement does. After all, previously they were almost sure that they could not be found or imprisoned, especially those who are not directly related to drugs, do not concern them. Therefore, there was no fear of doing all this. Now, anyone who is familiar with our activities will think twice and weigh all the pros and cons before making a decision to start selling drugs.
You publish personal data of suspects, which causes disputes among your subscribers and users of Kaznet. Is this approach ethical?
— We believe that it is the publication of personal data that has the maximum effect. And there are many advantages here. First, even if the case suddenly does not reach the best ending — the conclusion of the criminal behind bars, there is a high probability that he will lie down on the bottom and stop selling drugs. After all, now his relatives, parents and friends know about it, who can apply the right pressure. This has already happened in practice and repeatedly.
Secondly, such publicity allows you to avoid those slippery moments that are not uncommon in our country — criminals can buy off. After all, even if we pass on all the information to a reliable employee, whom we fully trust, and then he carries out surveillance and detention, then other employees, judges, prosecutors, who can easily influence the course of the case, go further. And when there is publicity, it is much more difficult to do it. Few werewolves in uniform will want to read in our posts about the huckster, which we identified, and then he miraculously got out of it.
In addition, it is the publicity that allows us to attract more attention to our movement.
We have new subscribers-and these are new sources of useful information, new assistants. If we hadn't done everything publicly, we wouldn't have been able to do it, and many of those who are now behind bars would still be at large.
Do your activities always comply with the law, or do you often operate in a gray area?
— Even the publication of personal data is not always legitimate. Therefore, we try to use various methods, mainly OSINT-that is, searching for data in public sources, various merged databases, and leaks. We often have to resort to social engineering, which is when we pull out useful information in our correspondence. All this is somewhere on the edge.
By the way, do your subscribers help you fight the drug mafia?
— As for the help of subscribers, we receive it regularly. Previously, we had to find our own goals for our work — we would go through chats, walk around the city and take pictures of advertising signs. Now this is not necessary at all, almost every day we are sent more and more new lists of sellers and recruiters who are trying to attract mortgagees to work. Moreover, many of our subscribers have become active and started their own fight against drugs — they paint over the signs in their city, take a closer look at suspicious individuals, and send us photos and videos of the pawnbrokers. Those who have technical skills can help us solve many issues that would require additional time — such as writing scripts and maintaining some of our services. I am very happy that there are more and more such assistants every time.
Why do many young people become pawnbrokers and breeders? They don't understand the consequences?
— Of course, first of all, in our opinion, this is still an imaginary anonymity. They believe that if they work through the Internet, no one will ever be able to find and track them down.
As a result, mortgagees and small dealers are always in debt, despite the huge income.
They can't quit their job because they don't see any other way to get out of this mess. Those who are bigger and with much higher incomes do not see any obstacles at all. They believe that they will never be caught and punished by justice if they hold leadership positions and do not deal with drugs. In general, now it's too easy and simple, anyone can become a pawnbroker.
We even had a case where the courier was a person with a wheelchair disability. Perhaps no one would ever have guessed what he does during his walks if it weren't for us. The only way to stabilize the situation is to raise the level of detection of these crimes, to discourage those who are still thinking about it. As for how to incriminate your loved one in connection with the drug mafia, we are now actively working on this issue. We are creating a tool that will make it much easier for police officers, as well as parents or close friends, to find both employees of drug shops and drug addicts themselves. We hope that we will be able to announce it in the near future.
How does recruitment work? Do people look for such jobs themselves, or do they go out for them?
— Most often, these are spam mailings in Telegram groups related to job search. Then there are OLX and street advertising. We had several posts where we exposed ad placemakers in different cities of Kazakhstan who were looking for pawnbrokers under the guise of legal work. But it happens that they write in plain text who they need and for what purposes. This is what concerns pawnbrokers, the exchange resource of drug shops. More responsible positions, such as managers, operators, are most often chosen from already familiar, reliable people who were able to somehow prove themselves or were able to give a good deposit in the amount of 500 thousand to three million tenge.
Now you've switched to pedophiles. Are you going to expose them as publicly as you do drug dealers?
— While we are only studying this topic, although many methods are similar, there are a significant number of nuances that we are not yet prepared for, and it takes considerable time to understand how to properly build work in this direction. But yes, we plan to de-ban pedophiles in parallel. Now it is still very important to establish contacts with law enforcement agencies that can help us in these matters.
Here, as it turned out, everything is much more complicated — we do not have a special body that could deal specifically with these problems. I think it will take a couple of months before we can think things through properly and figure out how to move forward. But what is certain is that we will publish their personal data in the same way as with drug shops. We believe that this is even more important, because these people can pose the greatest danger to our society, threatening the most valuable thing that we have.
Don't you worry that this approach may provoke situations where suspects may harm themselves or others?
— We have repeatedly considered these issues. Before publishing the data, if a person has not yet been detained by the police, we try to think carefully and weigh everything, predict all possible outcomes. Of course, you can't foresee everything, but so far there have been no such incidents and I hope there won't be any.
How accessible is such content in Kaznet and are the authorized bodies actively fighting it? How do pedophiles work online, and how can parents protect their child?
And they fight it, as it seems to us, much worse than with drugs, if at all specifically somehow work in this direction. For us, this is a completely new topic and not everything is clear about the situation as a whole. We have already witnessed how pedophiles enter into correspondence with children under 15 years of age, try to get acquainted with them and invite them to a meeting. By the way, this is also common in the drug industry.
Unfortunately, among the clients there are very young teenagers who are ready to go to a meeting with an unknown person for the promise of a dose. To protect their children, we believe that parents can only do one thing — establish a trusting relationship with their child. Ask them what their hobbies are and what friends they have. We don't say that you need to follow up, but you should definitely show interest. And only through a trusting two-way relationship can you protect your child from bad influences, be it pedophiles, drugs or any other troubles.
In your opinion, is it possible to completely clear Kaznet of illegal content and drugs?
"Of course not. It's like dreaming of a perfect world. Kaznet will be able to completely clear itself only when it is replaced by a more convenient and suitable tool for absorbing this content. All we can do is minimize the availability of this content and make it more difficult to access, while trying not to harm the comfort of using it for legal purposes.
How do you assess the security of personal data in our country? What shortcomings and omissions do you see on the part of government agencies and businesses?
— All these plums are a side effect of everyone's favorite digitalization.
Therefore, you should always remember that any information that you leave on the Internet, sooner or later an attacker can get it.
We are not saying that you should give up all these benefits, you just need to understand and always keep in mind the idea that your personal data may become known to everyone. To combat leaks, we believe that it is necessary to increase the responsibility of those responsible for these leaks. Right now, the best thing that can happen is that you will just be announced about the fact itself, and that's it. But no one will be punished. In fact, companies that have made this kind of mistake should face very severe penalties in the form of fines, and those that will seriously hit their business. This is the only way to make them more or less carefully monitor the data that our citizens have entrusted to them.
