Reporting fraud in Germany

If you have just realised you have been defrauded, start with the first hours. The rest can wait until tomorrow. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

Let me be honest with you before you read any further, because you will find plenty of websites that are not.

Most people do not get their money back. BaFin, the German financial regulator, puts it plainly: the chances of recovering money lost to a fraudulent trading platform are minimal, and a total loss is likely. The Verbraucherzentrale says the same thing — the prospects are very poor.

That is not a reason to do nothing. Speed genuinely changes the odds in the first hours, some payment methods really can be reversed, and reporting matters even when your own money is gone. But anyone who tells you recovery is likely is either mistaken or selling something.

The first hours: the money

Call your bank now. Not the app, not email — the phone. Ask for the fraud desk and say the words "Ich bin Opfer eines Betrugs geworden und möchte eine Rückholung der Zahlung beantragen." What is possible depends entirely on how you paid.

If you made a bank transfer (Überweisung)

A transfer you authorised yourself cannot simply be reversed. There is no button. What your bank can do is send a Recall — a request to the receiving bank asking it to return the money. Whether that works depends on whether the money is still sitting in the receiving account, which is often a matter of hours.

If you paid by instant transfer (Echtzeitüberweisung), the money arrived in seconds and a recall will almost certainly be too late. Ask anyway.

Ask your bank for the recall reference in writing, and ask them to tell you the outcome. You will need it later.

If it was taken by direct debit (Lastschrift)

This is the one case where you have a clear right, and it is a strong one.

A direct debit you authorised: you can demand the money back within eight weeks of the debit, without giving a reason. Your bank must return it.
A direct debit you never authorised: you have thirteen months.

Do it through your bank; the online banking interface usually has a Lastschrift zurückgeben option. Do not wait for the platform to respond first.

If you paid by credit card

Ask your card-issuing bank to open a chargeback. This is a card scheme process, not a German legal right, and the deadlines come from Visa and Mastercard rather than from German law. They are measured in months rather than years and they run from the transaction or from when the promised service should have been delivered — so ask your bank what your deadline is on the day you call, and do not let anyone tell you to wait and see.

Say clearly that the merchant was fraudulent and that no service was provided. Your bank may charge a fee for the process.

If you used PayPal or a similar service

Open a dispute in the account immediately. Be aware that buyer protection is generally built around goods that did not arrive, and investment payments frequently fall outside it. It costs nothing to try.

If you used Western Union, MoneyGram or a similar transfer service

Call their fraud line at once. Money can be stopped for as long as it has not been collected in person at the other end. After it has been collected, it is gone.

If you sent cryptocurrency

Assume it is irrecoverable. There is no chargeback and no recall.

Two things are still worth doing. If you sent it from an exchange account, report the fraud to that exchange — funds occasionally reach an account they can freeze. And save the transaction hashes and wallet addresses, because they are the evidence investigators can actually work with.

Then stop the bleeding

If the platform holds your card details, or you gave anyone remote access to your computer or phone:

Have the card blocked. In Germany the central blocking number is 116 116 (from abroad: +49 116 116), and it works around the clock.
Change the passwords for your bank, your email and anything sharing a password with them — from a different device if remote access was involved.
Never install anything else they ask you to install. Remote-support software is how the second withdrawal happens.

Report it to the police (Strafanzeige)

Fraud is a criminal offence in Germany (§ 263 StGB). Filing a report costs nothing, needs no lawyer, and does not require you to have any evidence beyond what you already have.

Where: any police station in Germany, whatever your nationality or residence status. Or online through your state's Online-Wache. All sixteen federal states offer one, though what each accepts varies, and the shared entry point is portal.onlinewache.polizei.de. Fraud is exactly the kind of case online reporting is designed for.

Call 110 instead if there is any threat or immediate danger. The online route is not for emergencies.

What to bring or upload: see the evidence list below. A report with the payment references and the website address attached is worth many times one without.

You will receive a file number (Aktenzeichen). Keep it — your bank, and anyone else you deal with later, will ask for it.

Realistically, most of these platforms are operated from outside Germany and most cases are closed without a suspect. Report anyway. Investigators join cases together, and your payment trail may be the one that connects to a prosecution already running elsewhere.

Report it to BaFin

BaFin supervises financial services in Germany, and operating without its authorisation is unlawful. It cannot recover your money and it does not act for you individually — but it is what turns one person's experience into a public warning that stops the next person.

Consumer helpline: 0800 2 100 500, free from within Germany, Monday to Friday 08:00–18:00. From abroad: +49 228 299 70 299.
Online: BaFin publishes contact forms for consumer enquiries and for reporting a suspected breach at bafin.de.

Tell them the exact website address, the dates, how you were first contacted, and where the money went. If BaFin decides the operator was doing unauthorised business, it can publish a warning — which is how entries on this site come to exist in the first place.

Before you ever pay anyone again, check them in BaFin's company database (Unternehmensdatenbank), which lists every firm authorised in Germany. A firm that is not in it, and not authorised elsewhere in the EEA, has no business taking your money.

What to save, right now

Save it before you do anything else — fraudulent sites disappear, and chat histories get deleted from the other end.

Screenshots of the platform: your account page, the balance it claimed, the withdrawal screen, any "tax" or "release fee" demand
The website address, in full, and any slightly different addresses used
Every message: WhatsApp, Telegram, email, SMS, dating apps. Export the chat rather than screenshotting a few lines
Names, phone numbers and job titles you were given, and any photographs or documents they sent to prove identity
Payment records: transfer confirmations, card statements, crypto transaction hashes and wallet addresses
Dates: first contact, first payment, the last one, and when you realised

Put it all in one folder and keep the originals. You will be asked for the same material three or four times.

The second scam is aimed at you now

This part matters as much as anything above.

People who have lost money to an investment platform are frequently approached again, within weeks, by someone offering to get it back. They may call themselves a recovery service, a blockchain tracing firm, a lawyer, an investigator, or a government agency. They may already know exactly how much you lost and where you sent it — because that information is traded between fraudsters.

BaFin warns about this directly: fraudsters often pretend to help you recover lost money. BaFin has gone as far as publishing warnings about individual fund-recovery websites, and it warns separately that its own name is used in these approaches. BaFin never telephones private individuals about this, and never instructs a third party to do so on its behalf.

The pattern is always the same, whatever the story:

They found you, rather than the other way round
There is a fee, a retainer, a "release fee", a tax, or a deposit — always before anything happens
There is urgency, and a reason the normal route will not work
They want remote access to your computer, or your banking details, "to trace the funds"

No legitimate service asks for payment in advance to recover stolen money. The police do not charge. BaFin does not charge. A German lawyer will give you their fee basis in writing before doing anything, and will not cold-call you.

If you have already been approached: stop replying, report it, and add it to the same police file. It is a separate offence.

Free help, and when a lawyer is worth it

Verbraucherzentrale — the consumer advice centres. Every federal state has one. They give independent advice on fraud and on disputes with your bank, in person, by phone or online, free or for a small fee. If you are not sure what to do next, this is the least expensive good advice available in Germany: verbraucherzentrale.de.

A lawyer (Rechtsanwalt) starts to make sense when there is somebody solvent to claim against — most often your own bank, where an unauthorised payment was made from your account, or where you believe the bank failed in its duties. A specialist in Bankrecht or Kapitalmarktrecht is the right kind. Ask about cost at the first contact, and check whether you hold legal expenses insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung), which frequently covers this.

Be wary of any firm that advertises heavily to fraud victims and promises recovery. The honest ones tell you the odds first.

What to expect

Weeks, not days. Your bank will take time to answer the recall. The police file may be closed without a suspect. BaFin will not tell you what it did with your report, because it is not permitted to.

None of that means the reporting was pointless. The warnings that let other people check a platform before they pay exist only because someone who was defrauded first took an hour to report it.

If the platform that took your money has been warned about by a regulator, it may already be listed here. Search the register — and if it is not there, that is not reassurance. It means only that no authority connected to this register has published a warning under that name yet.