Fake platform, fake broker, cultivated relationship: crypto-asset fraud

Three accounts keep coming back, and they end the same way: a website showing a balance, a contact who reassures, then a withdrawal that never leaves. Many people conclude that nothing more can be done. That conclusion is often premature. The funds leave traces in the banks and platforms they passed through, the website and those who promoted it can be targeted, and events several years old are not necessarily time-barred. The firm acts at every one of these stages.

The account shows a gain. The first withdrawals, where there were any, went through. Then the large withdrawal is refused, and a reason appears: a tax to settle, a release fee, a compliance formality, an identity check that never ends. From that moment, what remains recoverable shrinks by the day.

This delay is not a question of patience. The funds paid over first passed through accounts held with providers subject to customer identification duties, banks or exchanges established in the Union. For as long as they remain there, they can be located and frozen quickly. Once split, converted and moved out, they become harder to reach, but not out of reach: the accounts they passed through remain identifiable.

The firm acts regularly in these matters, at every stage: freezing funds, filing a complaint and joining the proceedings as a civil party, acting against intermediaries, following the case through to recovery. Since 2025 it has, among other results, obtained freezes of crypto-assets with exchanges for the benefit of those who had suffered a loss.

Three schemes, one mechanism

The labels vary, the structure does not: a credible staging, a progression in stages, then a block at the point of withdrawal. What changes is the way trust was obtained, and that difference has legal consequences.

The fake platform and the fake broker

A website reproduces the visual codes of a regulated institution, displaying prices, a balance, open positions. An adviser calls, sometimes from a French number, and walks the client through the first payments. Several signs are unmistakable.

• The withdrawal is refused although the interface shows available funds, and the refusal is made conditional on a further payment.
• The sums paid did not go to the entity named on the website but to an account held in the name of a third party, sometimes in another State.
• The contact person changed once or more, the relationship being taken over by a supervisor, a compliance department or a legal department.
• The website is recent, its legal notices point to a company with no verifiable existence, and the number called appears nowhere else.

The fake adviser and the cultivated relationship

Here, no financial approach is made at the outset. Contact is established on a dating application, a social network or a messaging service, sometimes through a message sent to a wrong number. The relationship is built over weeks or months. The investment appears late, presented as a confidence, resting on a platform the other person says they use themselves. The first gains are real and can be withdrawn. The payments that follow cannot.

That duration is not a detail of the account: the law now takes it into consideration. Since 27 June 2026, fraud committed against a person whose state of psychological or physical subjection is known to its perpetrator carries seven years’ imprisonment and a fine of 750,000 euros, article 313-2 of the French Criminal Code. The time spent creating dependence, long treated as background to the story, now aggravates the sentence faced.

Put another way, what many people hesitate to recount is precisely what increases the perpetrator’s liability.

Release fees and the second wave

Sums demanded to release a withdrawal release nothing and add to the loss. They do, however, serve as evidence: they establish that the withdrawal was refused, and on what conditions. A second scheme often takes over, addressed to those who have already suffered a loss and asking them for fees paid in advance against a promise of recovery.

One point of law can be verified independently of the scheme. Since 1 July 2026, carrying on the business of a crypto-asset service provider is prohibited to anyone who has not been authorised in accordance with Article 59 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, article L. 54-10-4 of the French Monetary and Financial Code. The same provision prohibits anyone lacking that status from using a name, a corporate name or advertising suggesting that they are authorised. Breaching either prohibition carries two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros.

The complaint therefore does not rest solely on an account of what was promised. It also rests on a fact demonstrated by the mere absence of authorisation, without depending on any statement.

Tracing the first link, not the final address

A centralised exchange can block an account within minutes. It will not do so on the mere request of a private individual: that takes a production order, then a seizure, decided by the judicial authority, article 706-154 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure having expressly covered crypto-assets since 30 December 2024. What matters is that those requests go out quickly.

How quickly they go out depends on the state of the file handed to the investigators, and that file is what the firm prepares. In these schemes the point of entry is almost always identifiable: the funds were paid by transfer or by card, and therefore to an identified account, or bought on a regulated platform before being transferred. It is that first link that must be pointed to, rather than the final address.

A civil route runs alongside, without waiting for the investigation to progress: the court may authorise the sums to be blocked where the claim appears well founded in principle and its recovery is under threat, article L. 511-1 of the French Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures. It requires knowing whom to act against, which is the case more often than one might think where the receiving account bears a name.

The full sequence of these steps, from freezing assets to recovery by way of the complaint and the bank refund, is dealt with in Crypto-asset fraud: the routes to recovering funds. The present analysis confines itself to what is specific to these three schemes.

Two levers aimed at the website and at those who promoted it

A criminal complaint pursues the perpetrators. Two distinct mechanisms, both in force since 1 July 2026, make it possible to act on the website itself and on the chain that brought the victim to it. They are rarely used, and they produce effects where the criminal route is slow.

The first allows access to the website to be stopped, and reaches as far as the deletion or transfer of its domain name, article L. 621-13-5 of the French Monetary and Financial Code. The timetable is measured in weeks, where a criminal investigation is often measured in years. The same provision reaches those who promote such offers online.

The second prohibits online advertising in favour of an unauthorised provider and attaches to it an administrative fine of up to 100,000 euros, article L. 222-16-1 of the French Consumer Code. Its reach lies in whom it catches: not only the advertiser, but intermediaries and those who disseminate.

Most of these matters begin with an advertisement seen on a social network, with a video, with a private message sent after an innocuous first contact, or through an intermediary paid for introducing business. These intermediaries are often easier to identify than the operator of the website, and some have the means to pay compensation. Identifying the point of entry therefore opens an action against a party who can be reached where the operator of the website cannot. The firm assesses case by case, from the information you provide, what can be held against each of those involved.

The evidence that disappears with the website

What disappears first is the website itself and, in cultivated-relationship cases, the other person’s account. The items below should be kept from now on.

• Payment instructions and bank statements, with the IBAN of the receiving account and the name that account bears, which is rarely the one displayed on the website.
• Statements from the regulated exchange where the funds were first converted, with transaction identifiers and destination addresses.
• The pages of the website in their present state, legal notices and general terms included, together with the account interface and the message refusing the withdrawal.
• The domain name and the date it was registered.
• The whole of the exchanges in their original medium, unsorted and unselected, with contact identifiers, calling numbers and profiles used, and not as reassembled screenshots.
• The advertisement, video, listing or message through which first contact was made, together with the account that published it.

Screenshots of the account keep their value even though the gains displayed never existed. It is precisely that gap between what was displayed and what was real that proves the deception, and it can no longer be shown once the website has closed.

A word on personal exchanges. They are often what the person who suffered the loss least wishes to show, and often what best establishes the progression of the scheme, the part played by successive contacts and the knowledge they had of that person’s situation. Their use is open to discussion; their preservation is not.

What makes these schemes fraud

Fraud requires fraudulent manoeuvres that determined the handing over of the funds. It carries five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 375,000 euros, article 313-1 of the French Criminal Code. The manoeuvre cannot be reduced to a lie: it lies in the arrangement as a whole, a website reproducing the codes of a regulated institution, an interface displaying prices and positions, documents given proper form, a hierarchy of correspondents. It is that staging which the preserved evidence demonstrates.

The penalties are aggravated in several cases, article 313-2, among them the particular vulnerability of the person deceived and the state of subjection referred to above. Commission by an organised gang, frequent in these structures, raises the penalties to ten years and 1,000,000 euros.

An old case is not necessarily time-barred

As a rule, fraud can no longer be prosecuted six years after it was committed, article 8 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure. Article 9-1 makes an exception where the offence was concealed: the period then runs only from the day it came to light and could be established, up to a limit of twelve years after the events.

A scheme that keeps up the appearance of a credit balance and defers withdrawal through successive demands may fall within that exception. A case four, six or eight years old is therefore not necessarily lost. The date from which the period runs is the first question the firm examines, because it determines what remains possible.

Other, shorter deadlines run alongside: those for a bank refund where the funds left a payment account, and that for compensation out of assets confiscated from the perpetrators, once the conviction is final. They are checked from the first conversation.

What to gather before a first conversation

• The name of the website and its address, even if it is no longer accessible.
• The detail of the payments: dates, amounts, means of payment, IBAN and name of the receiving account, or the exchange used.
• The channel through which first contact was made and the date of that contact.
• The date of the first refused withdrawal and the fees demanded since.
• The stage of the proceedings: complaint filed and its date, receipt, decision to take no further action, ongoing investigation.

There is no need to have gathered everything before getting in touch: whatever is missing can be traced afterwards, with the firm.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know whether the platform is authorised?

The provision of crypto-asset services requires an authorisation granted in accordance with Article 59 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, and that authorisation is made public. In its absence the activity is prohibited and criminally punishable, whatever was promised to the client.

The relationship lasted months. Can that be held against me?

No, and the law says the opposite. The time over which trust was built characterises the method used by the perpetrator and has been, since 2026, an aggravating circumstance of fraud. What takes long to recount is what weighs against them.

I am being asked to pay a tax to release my withdrawal. Should I pay?

No authority makes the withdrawal of funds conditional on first paying a sum into a private account. Fees demanded at that stage release nothing and add to the loss.

The website has disappeared. Is everything lost?

No. The website is neither the only lead nor the most useful one. The accounts that received the funds, the exchanges used, the domain name and the intermediaries who carried out the promotion are all points of entry, and several of them are subject to customer identification duties.

Can I act against the person who directed me to the website?

The question is worth asking, and the answer depends on the exact part that person played. Online advertising in favour of an unauthorised provider is prohibited, and the fine incurred is not confined to the advertiser.

A company offers to recover my funds against an advance payment. Is that serious?

Lists of those who have suffered a loss circulate, and a second scheme addresses them by demanding fees paid in advance. No “recovery” company can compel a foreign platform to return funds or have a seizure lifted: only court proceedings can. What is paid on that basis forms a separate loss, which attaches to the same complaint.