Modern Fraud Has Become Infrastructure Modern online fraud is no longer a collection of isolated scams. It has become infrastructure. Large-scale online investment fraud operates through networks of online advertising, social media manipulation, call centres, fake trading platforms, shell companies, payment service providers, acquiring banks, bank accounts, crypto ramps, nominee
PSD2 Fraud Transaction Monitoring: The Starting Point Before analysing the proposed Payment Services Regulation, it is important to understand the current PSD2 framework. Under Article 2 of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389, payment service providers must have transaction monitoring mechanisms that enable them to detect unauthorised or fraudulent payment transactions.
Enhanced transaction monitoring under the PSR is old wine in new bottles. The bottle is better. The protection for victims is still not good enough
EFRI’s Payvision Report: when payment infrastructure becomes fraud infrastructure
Today, EFRI sent a formal letter to the Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia and to European institutions concerned with the rule of law, consumer protection and asset recovery. Here you can read the full letter (translation). We represent 62 victims from across Europe who have been waiting for more
ING’s new AML settlement and the same message ING Belgium has agreed to pay a €1.6 million criminal settlement in a money-laundering investigation linked to transactions involving Didier Reynders, the former Belgian minister and former EU Commissioner for Justice. According to reporting on the Brussels prosecutor’s announcement, the case concerned
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
For years, high-risk merchants, offshore gambling operators and unlicensed online investment platforms have used a simple workaround to access European payment rails: insert an EU-based company into the payment chain and call it a “payment agent”, “payment processing agent” or “collection agent.” The model became popular for obvious reasons.
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
