Thick‐walled anisotropic components appear in some applications, e.g. in the nuclear power industry. The modeling of defects in such components is thus of practical importance. Hypersingular integral equations are here used to compute the scattering by rectangular and strip‐like internal cracks in a component of arbitrary anisotropy. The scattering is combined with models of transmitting and receiving contact probes. Numerical results are given comparing some rectangular and strip‐like cracks. © 2004 American Institute of Physics