Verification of Payee is one of the most praised anti-fraud tools in EU payments law. Under Regulation (EU) 2024/886 (IPR – Instant Payment Regulation), payment service providers must offer payers a service that checks whether the payee’s name corresponds to the payment account identifier before a euro credit transfer is
The new PSR compromise text preserves the immediate refund rule for unauthorised transactions on paper. But Article 56 may give banks a structured route to delay phishing refunds where they claim objectively justified suspicion of gross negligence. EFRI has long warned that Europe’s payment-fraud framework suffers from a structural protection
A new U.S. class action against Circle raises a fundamental question for the digital financial system: when does a crypto infrastructure provider stop being a neutral technology layer and become legally accountable for enabling the movement of stolen assets? A New Test Case for Crypto Infrastructure Liability A class action
The criminal case we have been following for years has now reached a major procedural milestone. On 27 January 2026, the Regional Court of Cologne (Landgericht Köln) delivered its judgment in the joined criminal proceedings arising from 112 KLs 6/21 and 112 KLs 2/24. The written reasons were later signed
The UK Financial Conduct Authority and the Financial Ombudsman Service have launched CP26/9, “Modernising the Redress System”, presenting it as a package designed to improve predictability, transparency and early intervention in consumer redress. The FCA says the aim is to create a smoother system for consumers while giving firms greater
The FTC’s message is clear: online fraud is growing, fast In its 25 March 2026 testimony, The Rising Scam Economy: Modernizing Federal Approaches to Protect Americans from Foreign Fraudsters, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission delivered a blunt warning to Congress: the scam economy is expanding. In 2025 alone, U.S. consumers submitted
Asset recovery in Europe remains deeply dysfunctional. From a victim perspective, the system still too often fails at the most basic level: returning frozen money within a reasonable time. At EFRI, we have seen this repeatedly. In the P2P GmbH case, prosecuted in Cologne, approximately €1.8 million was frozen in
Newly obtained chat records raise a central question for Europe: when does payment infrastructure cease to be neutral and become part of the machinery that keeps fraud alive? Persistence matters German prosecutors have proved exceptionally skilled at keeping victims away from the underlying court files: ongoing investigations, ongoing proceedings, documents
The UK’s new Fraud Strategy 2026–2029 is an important and overdue step – but on its current design it is unlikely to stop global scam networks on its own. From EFRI’s perspective, the core missing piece is a hard, enforceable “primary gatekeeper” regime for payment service providers and major online
Crypto coverage is already treating the Uniswap dismissal as another big win for the sector. That reaction is understandable, but it overreads the judgment. On 2 March 2026, Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed the Second Amended Complaint with prejudice in the class action Risley v. Universal Navigation Inc. Yet the
