Greece - Market Insights

In the era of digital value: fraud litigation and asset recovery in Greece

Fraud litigation in Greece is changing in a way that is more profound than a simple technological upgrade. The real transformation is not merely that fraudsters now use emails, mobile phones or online banking systems; it is that the entire legal environment in which fraud disputes arise is moving from paper-based transactions to digital communications, digital value, and digital intermediaries.

Today, a dispute may arise from a contract negotiated entirely by email, an acknowledgement of debt sent by SMS, an investment promise made through a messaging application, a payment instruction altered through business email compromise, or a fraudulent transfer executed through internet banking. The asset itself may no longer be money in a traditional bank account or immovable property. It may be a digital asset, a cryptoasset, or a tokenised interest or value held through an electronic platform.

This shift has important consequences for lawyers, courts, banks and businesses. It affects how rights are created, how obligations are proved, how assets are traced, and who may ultimately bear responsibility when value is lost through fraud.

Digital communications as legal evidence

One of the most important developments in Greek litigation is the increasing evidential significance of electronic communications. Emails, SMS messages and other forms of digital correspondence are no longer treated as informal background material. In practice, they may play a decisive role in proving legally relevant facts.

Greek case law has increasingly accepted that electronic communications may be relied upon to establish the conclusion of a contract, the modification of contractual terms, the acknowledgement of a debt or other legally significant declarations. In appropriate circumstances, such material may also support debt recovery mechanisms, including the issuance of a payment order where the statutory requirements are met.

This creates new opportunities and new risks. On the one hand, electronic communications may help claimants prove agreements, representations, instructions, and admissions that would previously have been difficult to establish. On the other hand, digital evidence is vulnerable to manipulation, deletion, selective presentation and disputes over authorship.

For practitioners, the ability to collect, preserve and present electronic evidence is becoming as important as the ability to plead the underlying fraud.

When the contract exists in a phone

The practical reality of commercial life has moved faster than traditional legal categories. Many business relationships now begin and develop entirely through electronic communications. Negotiations take place by email. Payment details are exchanged by SMS. Amendments are confirmed through messaging applications. Debts are acknowledged in short written messages rather than formal letters.

This does not mean that legal certainty has disappeared. It means that legal certainty must now be reconstructed through digital evidence.

In fraud disputes, this is especially important. A claimant may seek to prove that a defendant made false representations in an email. A defendant may argue that a message was taken out of context. A creditor may rely on an SMS as an acknowledgement of debt. A bank or payment provider may rely on digital logs to show that a payment was authenticated.

The dispute is therefore increasingly about the reliability of the digital record. Courts are called upon to assess not only what was said, but whether the evidence presented truly reflects what happened.

This has a broader consequence for asset recovery. If electronic communications can create, evidence or acknowledge obligations, they can also become the foundation for recovery action. The digital message may be the starting point for a civil claim, an interim measure, a payment order or a criminal complaint.

Digital assets as recoverable property

At the same time, the concept of property is expanding. Traditional asset recovery in Greece focused on bank deposits, immovable property, shares, receivables, and movable assets. Increasingly, however, value may exist in digital form.

Digital assets do not all have the same legal nature. A cryptoasset, a non-fungible token (NFT), a tokenised contractual right, an online account balance, and a digital platform entitlement may raise different legal issues. There is no single answer that applies to every category. Nevertheless, the broader direction is clear: where a digital asset has economic value, can be controlled, transferred and attributed to a person, it may become relevant for ownership, enforcement, succession, insolvency and asset recovery purposes.

This is highly significant in fraud cases. Fraud proceeds may be converted into digital assets or moved through digital channels in order to make recovery more difficult. A fraudster may transfer funds to a crypto exchange, hold value through a digital wallet, or use online platforms to distance the asset from the original victim.

The practical question is whether the legal system can identify who controls them, whether they derive from unlawful conduct, whether they can be frozen, and whether they can be returned or enforced against.

Banking fraud and the new defendant

A further major development is the changing role of banks and payment service providers in fraud litigation.

Historically, litigation focused primarily on the fraudster. The victim’s objective was to identify the wrongdoer, obtain a judgment and enforce against available assets. In many modern banking fraud cases, however, the fraudster is anonymous, located abroad or insolvent. Recovery from the fraudster may be unrealistic.

As a result, attention increasingly turns to financial intermediaries. The question becomes not only “who committed the fraud?” but also “could the loss have been prevented?”

This issue is particularly important in phishing, spoofing, business email compromise and authorised push payment fraud. In such cases, the victim may have interacted with a fraudulent communication and the banking system may show that credentials or authentication steps were used. But that does not necessarily resolve the legal question. If the customer was deceived, if the transaction was unusual, or if security systems failed to detect obvious red flags, the allocation of responsibility becomes more complex.

A recent judgment of the Multi-Member Court of First Instance of Thessaloniki illustrates this shift. The case concerned a phishing attack that led to a large unauthorised transfer through internet banking. The court examined the payment services framework under Law 4537/2018, which implemented the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), together with obligations relating to strong customer authentication, consumer protection, contractual good faith and tort liability.

The important point is not merely that the bank was held liable on the facts of that case. The broader significance is that the court refused to treat the use of electronic credentials as automatically proving genuine authorisation by the customer. It emphasised the burden of the payment service provider to prove authentication and authorisation, and examined whether the bank had adequate systems to detect and prevent an unusual and suspicious transaction.

This is a major development in the way banking fraud is analysed. It suggests that technology does not eliminate legal responsibility. On the contrary, the more banks and payment providers encourage customers to rely on digital systems, the more they may be expected to maintain effective, updated and risk-sensitive security mechanisms.

The new asset recovery problem

Modern fraud creates a paradox. In some cases, proving that fraud occurred may be easier than recovering the money.

Digital evidence may clearly show the deception. Bank records may show the transfer. Messages may show the false representation. Yet, by the time proceedings begin, the funds may have moved through several accounts, foreign International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs), payment institutions, digital wallets or crypto platforms.

In this environment, civil litigation, banking law, digital evidence, criminal proceedings and asset tracing can no longer be treated as separate areas. They are parts of the same recovery strategy.

Looking ahead

The future of fraud litigation in Greece will be shaped by three connected developments.

First, electronic communications will continue to replace paper as the primary source of legal evidence. Contracts, debt acknowledgements, payment instructions and fraudulent representations will increasingly be proved through emails, SMS messages and digital records.

Secondly, digital assets will become a more frequent object of ownership disputes, fraud claims and recovery efforts. Courts will need to address issues of control, transfer, valuation and enforcement in a technologically complex environment.

Thirdly, banks and payment service providers will face increasing scrutiny when fraud occurs through electronic payment systems. Strong customer authentication, transaction monitoring and warning mechanisms will become central to the allocation of loss.

Last, but not least, as fraud becomes increasingly digital and assets move rapidly across jurisdictions and electronic platforms, criminal proceedings are likely to become an indispensable component of asset recovery strategies. The investigative powers available to criminal authorities often provide the most effective means of tracing digital transactions, identifying asset flows and preserving recoverable property before it disappears.

The most successful fraud and asset recovery strategies in Greece will therefore not be those that merely prove that a fraud occurred. They will be those that can authenticate digital evidence, identify digital or conventional assets, understand the role of financial intermediaries and act quickly before value disappears beyond practical reach.