Denuncia or querela against fraudsters: why it is worth filing even when the money does not come back at once

The myth: the civil claim is the main tool. The reality: without a solvent defendant it leads nowhere

To win a civil claim, you need to know exactly whom to sue — and the defendant needs assets from which the sum can actually be recovered. The people who run these call centres deliberately hide behind front men across several jurisdictions precisely to make that impossible. A public prosecutor plays by different rules: the European Investigation Order (Directive 2014/41/EU) allows the authorities of one EU country to gather evidence in another within weeks rather than the months that traditional mutual legal assistance takes; to that are added searches authorised by a judge and access to banking data and to movements in crypto-assets. You do not have to track down the assets yourself. What you do have to do is act within the deadline and with the right instrument — and that is exactly where most cases are decided.

The myth: reporting the matter is a formality. The reality: for fraud, a denuncia on its own is not enough

Italian law knows two distinct instruments, and confusing them costs you the case. A denuncia is the notification of a fact: anyone who has learned of it may file one, including someone other than the victim, and it is sufficient for offences prosecuted of the authorities' own motion, d'ufficio (art. 333 c.p.p.). A querela is something else — it is the declaration by the injured person that she wants the offence punished, and for offences prosecutable only on a querela, fraud (truffa) among them, nothing happens without it: the file is closed and archived, however real the loss. The deadline is strict: three months from the day the injured person learned of the fact constituting the offence (art. 124 c.p.). In investment fraud that day is, as a rule, not the day of the transfer but the day the withdrawal is refused or blocked. Someone who comes to a lawyer four months later may already have lost that route, and the case then has to be built on offences prosecuted d'ufficio — among them money laundering, riciclaggio (art. 648-bis c.p.), which Italian law punishes far more severely than fraud. This applies to crypto-assets exactly as it does to bank transfers to a call centre.

In every filing we draft we then include a clause that looks minor and is not: the declaration that you wish to be informed if the prosecutor asks for the case to be archived. Without that declaration you receive no notice at all and learn of the closure when there is nothing left to be done; with it you have twenty days to inspect the file and lodge an opposition (artt. 408 and 410 c.p.p.). The opposition, however, is admissible only if it states which further investigations are to be carried out and with what evidence: a general complaint that too little was done is declared inadmissible. The Victims' Rights Directive (2012/29/EU), for its part, guarantees the victim of a crime a minimum standard of rights — to be informed, to be heard, to take part in the proceedings — irrespective of nationality.

The myth: if they seize the money, it will be given back to me. The reality: nobody shares it out on your behalf

Directive 2014/42/EU requires every Member State to have its own arrangements for confiscating the proceeds of crime, but it does not govern how those assets are then shared out among the injured parties. In Italy there is no mechanism that automatically distributes what is seized or confiscated among the victims on record: whoever stays outside the proceedings stays outside the money as well. The injured person's instrument is the costituzione di parte civile — joining the criminal proceedings as a civil claimant, which brings the claim for compensation inside the criminal case; every offence gives rise to an obligation to make restitution and to compensate the damage (art. 185 c.p.). It is worth saying precisely what that produces: in most investment-fraud files the criminal judge does not quantify the whole loss but issues a general finding of liability, a condanna generica, and sends the parties before the civil judge, awarding a provvisionale — an interim sum for the part already proven (art. 539 c.p.p.); the provvisionale is immediately enforceable (art. 540 c.p.p.), but it must be expressly requested. The timing on assets does not match expectations either: during the investigation the seizure is applied for by the public prosecutor, whereas the parte civile can seek in its own right a sequestro conservativo — a protective freeze on the accused's assets — only once the prosecution has been formally commenced, in the proceedings on the merits (art. 316 c.p.p.). There is a far from small advantage in return: a compensation claim secured in this way acquires privileged rank.