Investment fraud
You saw a balance grow on a screen. The money behind it was never invested.
We act for victims of fraudulent trading platforms before the Spanish criminal courts, in English, from Alicante and across the Costa Blanca.
In brief. Defrauded by a fake crypto trading platform in Spain? English-speaking criminal lawyers in Alicante explain your rights under art. 248 CP and how to act fast.
At a glance
A fraudulent trading platform is not a bad investment. It is a staged one. The website, the dashboard, the rising balance, the account manager who calls you by your first name: all of it exists to produce one behaviour, which is that you transfer more. There is no trading desk behind the interface. There are no positions. The figure you watch climbing is a number typed into a database that the operators control.
This matters legally, and it matters more than most victims realise. Losing money on a real but volatile investment is a civil misfortune. Being induced to transfer money by a deliberately false representation is estafa, criminal fraud under article 248 of the Spanish Criminal Code. The distinction decides whether you are a disappointed investor with a contractual claim, or the victim of a criminal offence with the investigative power of a Spanish court behind you.
Article 248 requires four elements: a deception sufficient to cause error, an error in the victim, an act of disposition made because of that error, and financial harm. A fake platform satisfies all four almost by design. That is why these cases belong in the criminal courts, and why the first conversation should be about evidence rather than about recovery percentages.
Almost every client we see waited. The reasons are consistent and human: embarrassment, a belief that one more payment will release the balance, and the account manager who is still answering the phone and still sounding reassuring. Some victims are told that a tax, a fee, or an anti money laundering deposit must be paid before withdrawal. That request is not a bureaucratic obstacle. It is the second phase of the same fraud, and it is often where the largest single loss occurs.
Time matters for a practical reason. Funds move through exchanges and intermediary wallets quickly, and the realistic window in which a Spanish court can order the freezing of an account is measured in weeks, not months. Every week that passes reduces what the investigation can reach.
Patterns
A site that copies the name, branding and sometimes the registration number of a genuine regulated firm. Victims who check the regulator find the real entity and conclude that the platform is authorised. The website is a facade with no connection to it.
Deposits work instantly. Withdrawals trigger a sequence of fees, taxes and verification payments. Each is presented as the last obstacle. This is the single most reliable indicator that no funds are held on your behalf.
Contact begins on a dating app, a language exchange or a professional network. Weeks or months of ordinary conversation precede any mention of investment. The investment is introduced as a personal confidence, not a sales pitch.
Months after the loss, a firm contacts you offering to recover the funds for an advance fee. In a significant proportion of cases the approach comes from people connected to the original fraud, working from the same victim list.
You are persuaded to install remote access software so an adviser can place trades for you. The software gives them your banking sessions and your wallet. The trades are theatre.
Funds are routed through the account of a third party, often someone recruited with a fake job advertisement. That person may face criminal liability for money laundering even without knowing the source.
The law
Ordinary fraud under article 249 of the Criminal Code carries a prison sentence of six months to three years. Where the sum defrauded does not exceed four hundred euros the conduct is treated as a minor offence punishable by fine.
Most platform cases fall into the aggravated bracket of article 250.1, which raises the sentence to between one and six years of imprisonment together with a fine. The aggravating circumstances that commonly apply are that the sum exceeds fifty thousand euros, that the fraud affected goods of first necessity or a dwelling, or that the victim was placed in a serious economic situation. Where the amounts involved are very substantial the Code provides a higher bracket still.
Two further provisions frequently appear alongside the fraud itself. Article 74 treats a repeated series of transfers induced by the same scheme as a continuing offence, which affects sentencing. Article 301 covers the laundering of the proceeds, and it reaches the intermediaries whose accounts received the money as well as the organisers.
Alongside the criminal penalty, the court determines civil liability arising from the offence under articles 109 and following of the Criminal Code. In plain terms, the criminal proceedings can order restitution without a separate civil action. This is the mechanism through which recovery, where it happens, generally happens.
Realism
We will not tell you that the money comes back. In many of these cases it does not, or only part of it does, and any lawyer who promises otherwise at a first meeting is selling something. What we can tell you honestly is what determines the outcome.
Recovery prospects are driven by three things: how fast the transfers can be traced before funds are dispersed, whether any identifiable person or account within Spanish or European jurisdiction received the money, and whether the payment left a regulated intermediary in its path. A bank transfer to a Spanish or European account is a considerably better starting point than a direct transfer of cryptocurrency to an unhosted wallet. Card payments sometimes carry chargeback routes that run on their own, much shorter, deadlines.
What a criminal complaint reliably achieves, even when funds are gone, is an official record, judicial investigative powers that a private individual does not have, and a documented loss that may matter for tax and for your own bank. Those are real outcomes and they are worth pursuing on their own terms.
Process
First, evidence. Before anything is filed we assemble what you have: transfer records, the platform interface, every message and call log, the names and numbers used by the account managers, and the wallet addresses or bank details you sent money to. Screenshots taken now are worth more than recollections later, because these sites disappear.
Second, the complaint. A criminal complaint is filed, either as a denuncia or, where we want to be a party to the proceedings from the outset with the procedural rights that carries, as a querella. For fraud of this kind the complaint goes to the investigating court, and specialist cybercrime units of the National Police and Guardia Civil are typically involved.
Third, the investigation. The court can order banks and payment providers to disclose account holders and movements, and can order funds frozen. This is the stage where speed pays, and it is the stage a private investigator cannot substitute for.
Fourth, joining other victims. These platforms rarely have one victim. Where several complaints concern the same operation, consolidating them strengthens the case considerably and distributes the cost.
Fifth, resolution. Depending on what the investigation finds, the case proceeds to trial, results in a negotiated outcome, or is provisionally stayed if no responsible party can be identified. A stay is not always final: it can be reopened if new information emerges.
Who we act for
A large part of our caseload comes from foreign residents between Alicante and the northern Costa Blanca. The pattern is familiar: retirement savings or a property sale sitting in a Spanish account, an approach in the victim own language, and a scheme that runs for months before the withdrawal request fails.
Being a foreign national changes nothing about your rights. You can file a criminal complaint in Spain if the harm occurred here, if you transferred from a Spanish account, or if any part of the scheme touched Spanish territory. You do not need to be a Spanish citizen, and you do not need to speak Spanish. We work in English throughout, and the court provides interpretation where it is required.
We also act for people who are not victims but have been drawn in: those whose accounts were used to receive funds, often after answering a job advertisement, and who now face a money laundering investigation. That is a defence matter and it is urgent.
Evidence
The strength of a fraud complaint is decided almost entirely by what can be documented, and documentation degrades fast. Fraudulent platforms are taken offline, chat histories are deleted from the operators side, and telephone numbers are abandoned. What exists on your own devices is often the only surviving record of a scheme that involved hundreds of people.
Financial records. Every transfer, with date, amount, beneficiary name, IBAN or wallet address, and the reference used. Bank statements rather than screenshots of a banking app, because a statement is a document the court can work with. If you paid by card, the card statement lines matter separately, since card networks have their own dispute routes with short deadlines.
The platform itself. Screenshots of your account dashboard showing the supposed balance, the trading history it displayed, and any withdrawal request you submitted together with the response. Save the full page including the web address, not a cropped image of a number. Where you still have login access, take these today.
The people. Names, telephone numbers, email addresses and messaging handles of everyone who contacted you, including the account manager, the supposed compliance department and any senior figure introduced later to reassure you. Export whole conversations rather than selected messages. The ordinary early conversations matter as much as the ones about money, because they establish how the confidence was built.
The paperwork they sent you. Contracts, terms, certificates, invoices, tax notices, licence documents. These are usually forged and their falsity is itself evidence. Keep them exactly as received, including the original email with its headers where possible.
Do not edit, annotate or reorganise any of it. Send us what you have in the state you have it, even if it feels fragmentary or embarrassing. Cases have been built on less than clients expected, and the material that victims assume is worthless, such as the small talk before the first deposit, is frequently what establishes the deception.
Fraud committed through fake cryptocurrency trading platforms is prosecuted in Spain as estafa under articles 248 and 250 of the Criminal Code, frequently in its aggravated form given the amounts involved and the number of victims. Where the operation is run by a structured group, the organised-crime aggravation may also apply.
These schemes are almost always cross-border, which raises questions of jurisdiction and international cooperation that must be addressed from the very beginning of the case.
The typical scheme presents a professional-looking platform showing rising returns, encourages further deposits, and then blocks withdrawals or demands fresh payments of supposed taxes or fees before funds can be released. A second wave of fraud often follows, in the form of bogus recovery services that target the same victims.
Recognising the pattern early is important, because prompt action improves the prospect of tracing and freezing funds before they disappear.
We work to trace the movement of funds through bank and exchange accounts, to identify the entities behind the platform, and to seek the freezing of assets where that is possible. Much of this depends on speed and on coordinated requests across jurisdictions.
The realistic prospects of recovery vary greatly from case to case, and we set them out honestly at the outset rather than encouraging false expectations.
We prepare and file the criminal complaint, gather and preserve the digital evidence of the transactions and communications, and pursue the civil recovery of the sums lost alongside the criminal proceedings.
We also advise victims on avoiding the secondary recovery scams that follow these frauds, and on the practical steps that best protect any remaining prospect of recovering funds.
Related
Questions
Usually yes. Spanish courts can act where the harm occurred in Spain or the funds left a Spanish account, even when the operators are elsewhere. European cooperation mechanisms exist precisely for this. The location of the website is far less important than the location of the money and of the victim.
Harder, not hopeless. Blockchain transfers are traceable by design, and the practical question is whether the trail reaches an exchange that holds identity records. Where it does, the court can require disclosure. Where funds went straight to an unhosted wallet and were dispersed, prospects are poor and we will say so.
No. There is no balance to release. Requests for a tax, a fee or a compliance deposit before withdrawal are a standard second phase of the fraud, and this is frequently where victims lose the most.
Limitation periods depend on the penalty attaching to the offence under article 131 of the Criminal Code, and for aggravated fraud the period is measured in years rather than months. But the legal deadline is not the real constraint. The practical constraint is how fast funds move, and that is measured in weeks.
We will give you a written fee estimate before you commit to anything, and an honest assessment of prospects at the same time. Where several victims of the same platform act together, costs are shared.
Yes, and you should. Victims are routinely encouraged to introduce others, sometimes with a small payment presented as a referral bonus. That is part of the scheme design, not evidence against you. Tell your lawyer about it at the outset so it is handled properly rather than emerging later.
Criminal proceedings in Spain are not conducted in public while under investigation, and victims are identified within the case file rather than in public announcements. If publicity becomes a genuine concern in your circumstances, raise it early and we will explain what can and cannot be protected.
Next step
A first conversation costs you nothing and will tell you whether there is a case worth pursuing. If there is not, we will say that too.
Société de Conseil Juridique et Expert es un despacho de abogados con sedes en Madrid, Alicante, Londres y París, especializado en defensa y acusación penal, delitos económicos y corporativos y derecho tecnológico. Trabajamos con orientación estratégica en procedimientos penales complejos, propiedad intelectual y análisis forense avanzado, y prestamos consultoría jurídica, compliance y escudos de protección a particulares y empresas. Atendemos desde Alicante y Madrid, con consulta online en toda España y asistencia al detenido 24 horas. Resuelva sus dudas en las preguntas frecuentes o solicite una primera consulta.
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