Bullying for the Sake of Hype: Who is Zhanna Kaparova Attacking?

Kazakhstani Zhanna Kaparova, who foolishly lost money on unsuccessful investments, has been waging an aggressive attack against Freedom Broker for several months and is asking for an audience with the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Tokayev and the head of the National Security Committee. However, in addition to Freedom, Zhanna was also displeased with the state financial regulator, women and Muslims. 

Miscalculated, but where?

Last fall, Kaparova filed a lawsuit against a former Freedom Broker employee, T. Bekov. He was an investment consultant at the company, but was fired. After that, Zhanna gave Bekov the passwords to her brokerage account, which had $380,000, in the hope of continuing successful investments. The Napoleonic plan for enrichment did not work - trading brought losses. Then Zhanna demanded money from Bekov and sued him, although there were no formal agreements between them, Zhanna gave access to the account herself, and Bekov did not appropriate the funds for himself, but only invested unsuccessfully. As a result, the capital’s prosecutor’s office closed the investigation due to the lack of corpus delicti. Zhanna was dissatisfied and continued to attack Freedom, to which she had been distributing various kinds of information for several months - including deliberately false information.

Her struggle 

When the case was closed, Zhanna realized that she would not get her money back - and how could she, if the broker had nothing to do with it, and she had not taken into account the risks and, apparently, hoped for a guarantee of success from trading - an activity in which there are no guarantees. The woman, who presented herself as the victim, began to terrorize Freedom on social networks and make up all sorts of fables about the company, such as the fact that Freedom is not a bank, not a broker, but a microfinance organization.

Overall, Zhanna’s activity on the Threads social network can be considered unsuccessful harassment. A funny and illustrative example is a series of messages asking whether the bank has SWIFT transfers (yes, and this is indicated on all of the bank’s platforms). 

Zhanna tried to compensate for the unpopularity of such posts by asking questions to the small audience: 

"Bloggers with a blue check mark and others write that it is necessary to submit reports, those who had cashback. And why don’t you bloggers write that people’s money is being written off en masse? Are there a lot of complaints about write-offs? Or are you just pushing the side?", asked Zhanna. There were no comments in response. 

Zhanna closely cooperates with the KazTAG publication, which is famous for a) misinformation of the reader and b) the scandalous past of its owners. Among the articles about Freedom as part of the information attack, KazTAG, for example, wrote: "Akashi Data Center controlled by Turlov appears in another criminal case."

What’s wrong with that? The fact that the case was opened against a former builder who worked in the data center — there was no connection with Akashi’s activities there. Another important detail — the data center was sponsored by Timur Turlov, but only partially. However, Turlov has no control over the company. And there are dozens of articles of this quality. Why KazTAG needs this war is unknown. But the media works together with Zhanna: Zhanna publishes every article about Freedom on her social networks, and KazTAG in return tirelessly searches for "compromising evidence", but since it can’t, it makes it up. And, of course, their favorite tactic is to take some news hook, rewrite the text of another media outlet and weave in something about Freedom. 

Just the other day, another article was published on KazTAG, where Zhanna says that "there are many audio messages, video messages, photos, video recordings, and so on, which say that Bekov admits that he manages the account." And this woman uses this as an argument that, in her opinion, the investigation was terminated illegally. This is strange, because this fact is the essence - the woman herself gave the account to Bekov for personal management. That is why the prosecutor’s office terminated the investigation: there is nothing to investigate there, Zhanna, of her own free will, gave Bekov the opportunity to both win and lose in trading. 

With all this, the woman in her story refers to various decrees, documents of state bodies, the Department of Economic Investigations, the state regulator ARRFR and much more. How many of these documents did KazTAG attach to the article? Correct - zero. The articles sucked out of a finger here are similar to the deal of Zhanna and Bekov - everything happens only in words. 

Zhanna also claims that Freedom’s trading platform Tradernet allegedly has no access to the American stock market - this is completely ridiculous. Neither the woman nor KazTAG are apparently interested in the fact that Freedom has been traded on the American stock exchange for several years, has entered strong American indices like Russell 3000, has repeatedly undergone independent audits in the USA and by companies from the Big Four. But no, the team of Zhanna and KazTAG literally does not believe the NASDAQ listing. This again confirms the woman’s complete ignorance of the stock market. It is not surprising that she committed a number of such stupid actions and ultimately "lost" on investments. Well, KazTAG with this article once again confirmed its reputation - a media outlet that brazenly lies to its readers. 

Manipulation of information and hysteria on the Internet do not work, so Zhanna finally decided to ask for a personal audience with the president and at the same time with the chairman of the National Security Committee. 

And either the woman believes that the "information" she has is not available to either the Kazakh special services or the authorities who interact with the bank at various levels, or that Mr. Tokayev is not so busy running the country and would be happy to give her a couple of hours in his schedule. Most likely, Zhanna hopes for both. But it wasn’t only "Freedom" that got it from Kaparova. 

Religious discrimination and the evil eye

In addition to false posts about Freedom, Zhanna is interested in esotericism, discussing her “good” friends behind their backs, and discrimination on religious grounds, which would amount to an article on inciting ethnic hatred – but she failed to “incite” it, since Kaparova, despite all her efforts, did not become popular on social networks. 

The woman decided that between attacks on Freedom it would be appropriate to throw a stone at Muslims, the dominant religious group in Kazakhstan. Thus, Zhanna writes that women in hijabs for her “hide something terrible and bad.” And she even somehow managed to drag Freedom into these very women.

Shortly before discussing Muslims, Zhanna decided to share a story about how she met her “good friend” — a really good one, judging by the post — but then for some reason encountered a series of failures. Perhaps Zhanna looks at the situation with the invested money from the same angle: it wasn’t she who invested in something she didn’t understand, but the evil eye worked. 

Epilogue

The story of Zhanna Kaparova is quite banal: she lost and wants someone else to take the rap. It is interesting only because the person does not calm down, but also plays to the crowd. But there is an explanation for this: Zhanna, apparently, wants not so much money and the collapse of "Freedom", as to meet the president, win the love of the crowd and advertise her services. As we can see, so far it has not worked out very well.