Since 30 December 2024, anyone raising money in Spain for investment in crypto-assets needs authorisation from the CNMV as a crypto-asset service provider under Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, known as MiCA, with a transitional period for firms already operating that in Spain ended on 30 December 2025. Until then, registration with the Bank of Spain in a register created in 2021 for anti-money-laundering purposes was enough, a register that checked neither solvency nor whether the business was real, and most of the pyramid schemes now before the courts did not even have that. What the reform did not touch is the Criminal Code, and a cryptocurrency investment that pays early participants with the money of those who join later is fraud under articles 248 to 250, punishable with one to six years in prison when the amount exceeds 50,000 euros or the victims are numerous. The organisers are criminally and civilly liable and, depending on what they did and what they knew, so is the acquaintance who recruited you. You report it to the Policía Nacional, the Guardia Civil or the investigating court in your city, whatever head office the platform claims to have in Dubai, Estonia or nowhere at all.
Before you report, what to keep today and what not to sign
The evidence in these cases disappears on its own. The platform dashboard with your fictitious balance stops loading, the Telegram group is deleted and the acquaintance who brought you in stops answering. Save, somewhere that depends on nobody else, the receipts for every transfer or Bizum payment you made, the confirmations for cryptocurrency purchases on the exchange, the wallet addresses you sent funds to and the identifier of each transaction, which appears in the exchange history. Take dated screenshots of the investment dashboard, the promised returns, the commission plan for bringing in new people and the whole website, and export the WhatsApp and Telegram chats with the recruiter and the group before they remove you.
There are three things you must not do. Do not pay anything more, whether to «unlock» your balance, as a tax or withdrawal fee, or to «recover» what you lost, because that payment is the second stage of the same fraud. Do not sign or accept by message any document that recasts what you handed over as a personal loan, a gift or a contribution to a company, even if the acquaintance offers it in exchange for a partial refund, because that signature will later be used to deny there was ever an investment. And do not give anyone your exchange credentials or install remote access software, however much the caller claims to be from the platform, the CNMV or the police. You can notify your bank and ask the exchange for the full history of your account, which it is required to keep. What you should not expect is that the bank will simply refund a transfer you ordered yourself, because that is a different situation from the unauthorised transaction I deal with in the article on bank refunds after phishing.
Paying the old with the money of the new, why the Criminal Code calls it fraud
Article 248 of the Criminal Code punishes anyone who, for profit, uses sufficient deception to mislead another person into a disposal of property to their own or someone else’s detriment. In a pyramid scheme the deception is in the origin of the business, because the promised return comes from the contributions of those who join later and from no real operation with cryptocurrencies. The Supreme Court has treated it this way since the major stamp-investment cases, Fórum Filatélico and Afinsa, in which it classified as fraud a business designed from the outset so that it could never deliver what it promised. That early participants collected interest does not exclude the offence, it is the part of the deception that makes the rest believable.
The sentence depends on the amount and the number of victims. Article 249 sets six months to three years in prison for basic fraud, with a fine of one to three months if the amount does not exceed 400 euros. Article 250.1.5 raises the penalty to one to six years in prison and a fine of six to twelve months when the value of the fraud exceeds 50,000 euros or affects a large number of people, and in a pyramid scheme at least one of the two almost always applies, because the amount is added up across the whole scheme and not limited to what you lost. Article 250.1.6 adds the same aggravation when the offender abuses the personal relationship with the victim or their business or professional credibility, which is the case of the adviser, the colleague or the relative who convinced you. If the fraud exceeds 250,000 euros, article 250.2 provides for four to eight years in prison and a fine of twelve to twenty-four months. Since recruitment is repeated with every investor, article 74 allows the conduct to be treated as a continuing offence, with the sentence in its upper half and based on the total loss.
| Scenario | Article of the Criminal Code | Penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Amount defrauded does not exceed 400 euros | 249 | Minor offence, fine of one to three months |
| Basic fraud, over 400 euros | 249 | Six months to three years in prison |
| Over 50,000 euros, large number of victims or abuse of personal relationship | 250.1.5 and 250.1.6 | One to six years in prison and fine of six to twelve months |
| Over 250,000 euros | 250.2 | Four to eight years in prison and fine of twelve to twenty-four months |
| Laundering of commissions earned by recruiting | 301 | Six months to six years in prison and fine of one to three times the amount |
The figures in the table decide whether the case is tried by a criminal court of first instance or by the Provincial Court, and also the limitation period, which I cover below.
The acquaintance who recruited you, when a perpetrator, when an accessory and when another victim
That person’s criminal position depends on what they did and what they knew. Article 28 treats as perpetrators those who carry out the act themselves or through another, those who induce another to carry it out and those who cooperate with an act without which it would not have been committed. Someone who recruited investors, earned a commission for each one, organised the meetings and repeated the promise of guaranteed returns knowing the money was not being invested is, at the very least, a necessary cooperator, with the same sentence as the organiser. Article 29 reserves complicity, with a sentence one degree lower, for those who help with acts that were not essential. Someone who merely recommended the platform believing it was genuine, put in their own money and lost it, is one more victim, however hard you find it today to forgive their insistence.
The line between the two is drawn by commissions and knowledge. Crypto pyramid schemes pay recruiters a percentage of what their referrals contribute, with tiers, codes and ranks, and that money comes directly from the offence. Article 301 punishes with six months to six years in prison and a fine of one to three times the amount anyone who acquires, possesses or uses assets knowing they originate from criminal activity, and its paragraph 3 keeps a lower penalty for those who do so through gross negligence, which covers the person who refused to see the obvious. A recruiter who collected commissions therefore has a criminal problem of their own even if intent to defraud cannot be proved against them, and those commissions can be seized and confiscated. The evidence lies in the messages you kept, in the platform’s compensation plan and in the movements on their account, which the court can request from the bank.
If that acquaintance moves from evasion to pressure so that you do not report or withdraw the complaint, that conduct may itself amount to coercion or threats and is reported separately.
Who gives the money back, civil liability arising from the offence and freezing of accounts and wallets
A criminal conviction carries the obligation to make good the loss. Articles 109 to 116 of the Criminal Code require those responsible for the offence to return what was handed over, repair the harm and compensate the damage, and article 116 makes that liability joint and several among perpetrators and among accessories within each class, so you can claim the whole amount from any convicted person who has assets. Article 122 reaches even those who did not take part in the offence but profited from it, up to the limit of what they received, which affects participants who withdrew more than they put in. Article 127 orders the confiscation of the proceeds of the offence and of the assets into which they have been converted, and the cryptocurrency in an identified wallet is confiscated like any other asset.
The legal title to collect exists from the judgment. The hard part is that something is left to seize when it arrives, because in a pyramid scheme the money flows from day one into intermediate wallets, unregulated exchanges and third-party accounts. That is why the law allows action before conviction. Article 13 of the Criminal Procedure Act (LECrim) authorises the investigating judge to adopt, from the very first steps, the measures needed to protect the victims, and articles 589 and following govern the bond and the seizure of the suspect’s assets to secure financial liabilities. With a public blockchain, transactions can be followed from one address to the next until the money touches a regulated provider, which has identified its customer and can receive a court order to freeze. That tracing is evidence and is the route to what can be seized.
At that point, what we do at the firm for the victim is to enter them in the proceedings as a party and ask the court for freezing orders and information requests on whatever can still be located, as part of the representation of investment fraud victims that we provide.
CNMV, Bank of Spain and MiCA, what the lack of authorisation proves and what it does not
Law 6/2023 on Securities Markets and Investment Services reserves the provision of investment services to firms authorised by and registered with the CNMV, and the CNMV itself publishes warnings about those soliciting clients without authorisation, the so-called «chiringuitos financieros» or boiler rooms. Since MiCA became applicable, the register of authorised crypto-asset service providers also falls under the CNMV, and CNMV Circular 1/2022 requires crypto-asset advertising aimed at investors in Spain to include the risk warning and mass campaigns to be notified to the supervisor in advance. Regulation (EU) 2023/1113, adopted alongside MiCA, further requires providers to accompany every transfer of crypto-assets with the details of the originator and the beneficiary.
Checking those registers to confirm the platform appears in none of them takes a few minutes and serves two purposes. In the complaint, that absence is evidence of the deception, because whoever claimed to manage investments had no licence and concealed it. In tracing the money, the presence of regulated providers along the route of the funds is what makes it possible to request data and freezes, because an exchange with European authorisation complies with court orders and one based on an island with no treaty does not. What the lack of authorisation does not do is turn every failed investment into fraud by itself, nor oblige anyone to refund you, because repayment is decided in the criminal proceedings or in a civil claim, not in the supervisor’s file.
As for the bank your transfer left from, payment services legislation requires unauthorised transactions to be refunded, and a transfer you ordered to an account you chose is not one of those, even if you were deceived into ordering it. There are situations in which the sending or the receiving bank has something to answer for, particularly where the destination account was a mule account opened without proper controls, and how that claim is framed, and against whom, is the lawyer’s job. In the article on scams impersonating your bank I explain the difference between an authorised transaction and an unauthorised one.
Reporting in Valladolid, Málaga or A Coruña a platform that claims to be in Dubai
Article 14 of the Criminal Procedure Act assigns the investigation to the court of the place where the offence was committed, and the Supreme Court has established for fraud that this place is any of those involved in the offence, including the one where the victim made the disposal of property. If you ordered the transfer from your home in Valladolid, Málaga, Córdoba or A Coruña, the investigating court in your city has jurisdiction, and the complaint is filed there, at the Policía Nacional or the Guardia Civil, regardless of where the server is or the head office the platform claims. When the victims are spread across several provinces and the fraud affects the public at large, article 65.1.c) of the Organic Law on the Judiciary allows the investigation to be concentrated in the Audiencia Nacional, as has happened in the largest schemes.
That the organisers are outside Spain does not make the complaint pointless. Within the European Union, the European Investigation Order, incorporated into Law 23/2014 on mutual recognition of criminal judgments, allows the Spanish judge to ask an exchange or a bank in another member state for account data or a freeze, and Europol and Eurojust coordinate investigations with victims in several countries. Outside the Union, cooperation depends on treaties with each state and is slower, but the trail of cryptocurrencies is public and does not depend on jurisdiction. Whatever moves on the blockchain stays recorded, and the fraudsters’ weak point is that to convert it into euros they have to go through some provider that asks them for identification.
The complaint also interrupts the limitation period, fixes the date of the facts and gives the court the basis to order freezes. Without a complaint, none of that happens.
Several victims, the Telegram group and the fake recovery agent who will call later
If several people joined through the same acquaintance or the same platform, reporting together makes sense. The facts are connected, article 17 of the Criminal Procedure Act allows them to be investigated in a single case, the total amount is what triggers the aggravation under article 250, and a private prosecution representing a group shares the cost and carries more weight with the court than a dozen loose complaints. What you should not do is organise through the victims’ group that appears out of nowhere on Telegram, with an administrator nobody knows who proposes hiring a recovery company.
The fake recovery agent is the scam that follows the scam. Weeks after the loss, someone presents themselves as a lawyer, a blockchain expert, an official of the CNMV or of a police unit, claims to have located your funds and asks for an upfront payment, a retainer, a fee or your wallet keys to make the refund. The CNMV has repeatedly warned about these practices. No court, no police force and no supervisor charges in advance to return money, and no registered lawyer asks for your account credentials. Check the bar registration number of anyone claiming to be a lawyer in the search tool of the Spanish General Council of the Bar before you keep talking.
Ten years to report and proceedings measured in years
Aggravated fraud under article 250 becomes time-barred after ten years, because article 131 of the Criminal Code sets that period for offences with a maximum prison sentence of more than five years, and basic fraud under article 249 after five. In a continuing offence the period runs, under article 132, from the last act, which in a pyramid scheme is usually the last contribution collected. The legal deadline, therefore, is not what presses. What presses is the evidence being erased and the money being moved, which is why the complaint should be filed within weeks.
As for duration, an investigation with dozens or hundreds of victims, requests to providers in several countries and wallet analysis runs for years before trial, and the chance of recovering anything depends almost entirely on what was frozen in the first months. A conviction with a civil award nobody can pay is the usual ending when the complaint comes late and without asking for measures. Once proven in the proceedings, the loss may be reflected in your Spanish income tax as a capital loss, but the timing and conditions depend on the criteria of the Directorate-General for Taxation and are a matter for your tax adviser once the case is open.
Frequently asked questions
What is the penalty in Spain for a cryptocurrency scam and does it change with the amount defrauded?
The basic sentence is six months to three years in prison (article 249 of the Criminal Code) and rises to one to six years in prison plus a fine when the amount exceeds 50,000 euros or there is a large number of victims (article 250.1.5). Above 250,000 euros, four to eight years (article 250.2). Below 400 euros it is a minor offence, punished only with a fine.
Complaint or criminal complaint by lawyer (querella)? Should I join the case as a private prosecutor?
A querella is signed by a lawyer and makes you a party from the start; a complaint can be filed by you and leaves you outside the case until you join it. Joining as a private prosecutor (articles 109 and 110 of the LECrim) lets you request freezes, propose evidence and claim your money. It pays off from a few thousand euros or with several victims; for a few hundred, the complaint is enough.
The step to take now is the complaint with the receipts, the wallet addresses and the recruiter’s messages, together with the request that the court freeze whatever can still be located, and that request, along with joining the case as a private prosecutor, is drafted and argued by the lawyer, because every week that passes the money changes wallet and country. At the firm we represent victims of investment and cryptocurrency fraud and of cybercrime, in A Coruña and before any court in Spain. You can call +34 677 841 007 or write to us through the contact page, and we reply as soon as possible.