cryptop-market.com is a scam: chargeback denied and investigations stalled since 2020

Foreword: we are a law firm and we deal exclusively with online scams. We have already handled the case of a person who fell into the trap of cryptop-market.com and we can help anyone who suffered the same scam: if you want assistance, fill in the request form at the bottom of this article.

cryptop-market.com is a scam: not because of the website, which can no longer be reached today, but because of the path the money took. In March 2020 a credit card issued by a Swiss bank was charged 11,000 euros in three payments made close together, in favour of an «exchange» selling bitcoin; the bitcoin were delivered to an address indicated by the customer and from there ended up on the «trading account» of a platform that promised, through a «broker», a return of 11 to 20% per month. Six years later the bank had refused the refund, a Swiss cantonal public prosecutor's office had suspended its investigation against unknown persons, and an Italian Public Prosecutor's Office had requested the case be closed, also against unknown persons. We examined the documents in the file: the contract, the account statements, the replies of the merchant and of the bank, the Swiss decree and the records of the Italian proceedings.

The conclusion is clear: cryptop-market.com is a scam because no serious intermediary promises 11 to 20% a month, because the contract states that the money paid becomes the property of the company, and because whoever collected the money never showed either an authorisation or a verifiable registered office. The case of cryptop-market.com is also instructive for another reason, one that matters to those who work in criminal and civil practice: in a single file it shows every point at which the protection system breaks down, from the card dispute to the investigation against unknown persons that does not investigate.

How cryptop-market.com works: an exchange as the entrance door and a platform as a locked till

The mechanism of cryptop-market.com has two levels, and the second is invisible to anyone looking only at the account statement. The first level, the one that comes before cryptop-market.com, is the purchase of bitcoin by credit card from an operator that appears on the statement as «Cryptonet.Exchange», with an address in Tallinn and a British country code, while the billing is attributed to an Estonian limited liability company, Sail Technologies OÜ, which uses an acquirer, that is, a payment intermediary based in Malta. The three charges are dated 26 March (2,000 euros), 30 March (4,000 euros) and 31 March 2020 (5,000 euros). The amount grows with each transaction: this is a recurring pattern in which the first sum is a «trial» and the following ones are prompted by the progress of an activity that the person does not run alone. In the case we handled, the person reports the use of remote-access software during the transactions.

The second level is cryptop-market.com. The bitcoin purchased for cryptop-market.com do not stay with the customer: they are transferred, with an on-chain transaction, to the broker's account, where they appear as a «balance» and where the person can only watch a number grow. cryptop-market.com does not collect from the card and does not appear on the statement: it is the place where the money «works», and that is why, at the time of the dispute, whoever collected the payment can say they did something else. The issuing bank, in its last reply to the cardholder, writes that the Visa network definitively rejected the refund request because the documents produced did not show that the sums covered by the withdrawal request were on the investment account held with the merchant. That sentence condenses the problem: the card dispute system assesses what the merchant that collected the payment did, not what the platform to which the money was passed on did.

The «Client Agreement» of cryptop-market.com: what it promises and what it takes away

The contract of cryptop-market.com, in English, titled «Client Agreement with declaration of deposit», is the most interesting piece of evidence because it is the text that the victim signed and that the platform wrote. It contains at least five anomalies that, on their own, justify a severe judgement of cryptop-market.com.

The first concerns the identity of the counterparty. The contract is concluded with «Cryptop-market holdings limited», described as a company incorporated in Zurich and wholly owned by an «IBC Capital Ltd», described as the «Holdings Company». No registration number, no address, no jurisdiction of the parent company is given. The name «limited» does not correspond to any of the company forms of Swiss law (public limited company, limited liability company, limited partnership): anyone can consult the commercial register to check a name, but to do so an identification number and a legal form are needed, and the document offers neither.

The second is the nature of the declared activity: forex, contracts for difference (CFDs) and «other OTC financial instruments», with the company able to act «as counterparty» to the customer's transactions and earning its income from the spread. An operator that takes the other side of the customer and profits when the customer loses has a structural conflict of interest, which European investment services law (MiFID II) addresses with transparency and supervision rules: here the clause is presented as an ordinary contractual term. The document also mentions binary options, products whose marketing to retail clients had already been banned since July 2018 by product intervention measures adopted at ESMA level and later implemented by national authorities.

The third is the most serious clause: the funds paid «belong to the Company» and are treated as its own, and the customer «shall have no proprietary claim» over the money transferred. This is the opposite of the principle of asset segregation that any authorised intermediary must apply to client money (Article 22 of the Italian Consolidated Law on Finance and European rules). A customer who pays money to a company that declares it can use it as its own is not opening an account: he or she is making an unsecured loan to an unknown party.

The fourth is the «trust trading». The customer hands management of the account to a «Broker», who «assumes full responsibility for all risks» and undertakes to pay a return of 11 to 20% per month depending on the broker's profits. A return of 11% a month, compounded, produces over a year a capital of about 3.5 times the initial amount; with 20% a month the factor is about 8.9. No regulated market, no manager, no fund has ever sustained such figures steadily, and the idea that the broker takes on all risks without a visible capital structure is, economically, an impossibility. Legally, moreover, managing accounts on behalf of clients is an investment service (portfolio management, Article 1(5)(d) of the Consolidated Law on Finance) that may be provided only by authorised entities.

The fifth is the asymmetry of the exit. Whoever withdraws before the first payment loses the profits and has 10% withheld as a commission; withdrawals are paid within seven business days «if at the time of payment the margin requirements are met», and the company may cancel the withdrawal order at its discretion; the transfer of funds to the customer carries a cost deducted from the account. These are the clauses that make it possible, on the day the customer asks to withdraw, to reply that «the margin is not enough» or that «a further payment is needed»: a script we have already described in the analysis of a fake crypto trading scheme.

Domain, company and authorisations: what can really be verified about cryptop-market.com

On 11 November 2026 we queried the RDAP registry of the .com top-level domain, the same service that returns, for any registered name, the creation date, the registrar and the status. As a functioning check, the same query for a notoriously registered domain gave a positive result; for cryptop-market.com the registry answered that the name does not exist. This means the domain name is not registered today. We do not know whether it was registered in 2020 or by whom, and we cannot deduce it from an absence: but we do know that anyone wishing to check who is behind cryptop-market.com today would find nothing to consult. Platforms of this kind have a short life: cryptop-market.com is no exception, and when the site disappears the name follows.

As for authorisations, no licence emerges from the documents, either for cryptop-market.com or for the merchant that sold the bitcoin. To provide investment services to Italian clients one would in general need an authorisation from the Bank of Italy or Consob, or the European passport of an intermediary from another Member State; for the Swiss account, an authorisation from the federal financial market supervisory authority would be required. For companies offering virtual currency services, Estonian law requires an authorisation from the financial intelligence unit. The contract of cryptop-market.com mentions no authorisation and none has ever been shown. This is not conclusive negative proof, and we say so, but when an operator that promises such returns does not give a single registry number, the question of who it is must be turned around: it is for the operator to prove it.

Open-source searches on the name of cryptop-market.com return no supervisory records and no verifiable dedicated warnings. This too, on its own, proves nothing: platforms of this type operate for months before appearing on authorities' lists and, when they do, they have often already changed name. Anyone checking a site such as cryptop-market.com before investing should therefore rely on positive proof (a registry number, an authorisation that can be verified on the authority's website) and not on the absence of warnings.

Chargeback denied: why buying bitcoin by card neutralises the dispute

The person disputed the three charges with the issuing bank. The reason indicated in the merchant's reply forms, in relation to the transaction that fed cryptop-market.com, is code 13.5 of the card networks' classification, which relates to disputes for misrepresentation of the service. The merchant's defence, filed at the pre-arbitration stage, is a model of formal consistency. The merchant argues that its services are limited to buying and selling bitcoin against ordinary currency, that the bitcoin were delivered to the address supplied by the cardholder after the documents had been verified with a compliance partner, that the subsequent use of the bitcoin is the customer's responsibility and that the company has no relationship with the third parties to which the customer decides to transfer them. It adds that every transfer can be traced on a public blockchain explorer and attaches the identifiers of two transactions.

It is a defence that is true in itself, and that is why it works. What the merchant says it sold, that is bitcoin, was delivered. What the person believed they had bought, instead, was an investment with a guaranteed return, but that investment was not sold by the merchant: it was sold by cryptop-market.com, which does not appear on the statement. The dispute system, built to correct commercial errors between a merchant and a cardholder, does not have the tools to reconstruct a deception that crosses two parties and two payment systems. The merchant's file also reveals another detail useful to the defence: the person's same details (name, e-mail address, telephone number) appear in all three transactions, with a single variation of the e-mail address in the middle transaction. This is the kind of anomaly that, in a real investigation, deserves to be clarified.

On the practical side, the lesson that cryptop-market.com leaves to anyone disputing a charge is threefold. Whoever disputes a card payment must do so at once, within the deadlines set by the network, which are measured in months and not years. They must describe the facts as fraud, with the chronology and the documents, not as a generic «service not received». And they must know that, for authorised payments, the issuing bank's liability remains limited: the framework of Legislative Decree 11/2010 protects above all against unauthorised transactions, and a civil route against the issuer for failure of oversight, on behalf of a person who personally ordered repeated payments to a crypto operator, is narrow and should be pursued only with proof of a specific failure.

Aggravated fraud (Article 640 of the Criminal Code): the criminal framework of cryptop-market.com and the weight of time

The conduct described for cryptop-market.com amounts, according to the reconstruction in the file, to the offence of fraud under Article 640 of the Criminal Code. The artifices and deceptions are the promised returns, the presentation of a trading account with visible but non-withdrawable balances and the insertion of a payment operator in a sequence that makes the money both traceable and unrecoverable; the unjust profit is the sum collected, and the damage is 11,000 euros. One aspect not to be overlooked is that in this scheme the conduct is not a single act but a close series of payments, and the Court of Cassation, in judgment no. 5191/2026 (hearing of 13 January 2026), reaffirmed that fraud is «of prolonged consummation» when the deceptive activity continues in order to create the reliance needed to obtain further profits: the three charges must be read as a single event and not as three separate episodes.

On aggravating circumstances, the case shows how much the criminal law of online fraud has changed in a few years, and how dangerous it is to apply the categories of 2026 to the facts of 2020. Article 640, second paragraph, no. 2-ter of the Criminal Code, introduced by Law 90/2024, which concerns acts committed with computer or telematic means capable of hindering the identification of the perpetrator, is not applicable to conduct of March 2020: the less favourable rule is not retroactive (Article 2 of the Criminal Code and Article 25 of the Constitution). The Court of Cassation clarified, in judgment no. 27907/2026 (hearing of 14 July 2026), that this aggravating circumstance concerns the manner of execution and must be distinguished from the diminished defence of Article 61, no. 5, of the Criminal Code; but for the facts of 2020 the discussion remains, precisely, a discussion about the future.

For the 2020 facts linked to cryptop-market.com, a different prosecution regime applied. The aggravating circumstance of financial damage of particular gravity (Article 61, no. 7, of the Criminal Code) made fraud prosecutable ex officio; Legislative Decree 150/2022 (the Cartabia reform) removed that reference, and for offences that became prosecutable only on complaint its Article 85 provided a transitional regime, with a three-month period running from the entry into force of the decree for those who had already learned of the fact. For damage of 11,000 euros in conduct that has already occurred, and that has already been brought to the attention of two judicial authorities, the shift from the ex officio regime to the complaint regime is a point to be checked file by file, because the fate of the whole proceedings may depend on it. It is one of those cases in which a three-month period, which nobody talks about, decides.

The second front for cryptop-market.com is the Consolidated Law on Finance. Offering a trading account managed by a «broker» with a guaranteed return is, in substance, an investment activity carried out without authorisation (Article 166 of the Consolidated Law on Finance), and the Court of Cassation, in judgment no. 44378/2022, held that the online sale of virtual currency advertised as a form of investment for savers is an activity subject to the requirements of Articles 91 et seq. of the Consolidated Law on Finance. The precedent, which concerns an offer to the public, must be used with caution when the proposal is addressed to a single person, but here the standard contract, the uniform language and the sequence of products show an organised and repeatable activity, not a private relationship. In the case of cryptop-market.com it remains possible to charge criminal association (Article 416 of the Criminal Code) and, for whoever retained and circulated the proceeds, money laundering (Article 648-bis) and self-laundering (Article 648-ter.1): characterisations that are missing today only because nobody has reconstructed where the bitcoin ended up.

What remains is time, which for cryptop-market.com is the main enemy. For fraud not aggravated by special-effect circumstances, the limitation period is six years, which interrupting acts can extend to seven years and six months (Articles 157 and 161 of the Criminal Code): for facts of the last part of March 2020, the maximum term falls around September 2027, subject to suspensions. Whoever has waited six years for a hearing has already used up most of that margin: each month lost, in this type of investigation, is not only one month less for the bitcoin that move, but one month less for the prosecution of the offence itself.

Two countries, two proceedings, no investigation: the suspension against unknown persons and the objection to closure

The file on cryptop-market.com contains two decisions that anyone dealing with cross-border fraud should read carefully.

The first, in the cryptop-market.com matter, is the suspension decree of a Swiss cantonal public prosecutor's office, dated 11 January 2021. The proceedings, opened against unknown persons for fraud (Article 146(1) of the Swiss Criminal Code) for facts occurring between 24 and 31 March 2020 «in unspecified places», are suspended because the investigation did not make it possible to identify the perpetrator. The decision records that the Prosecutor collected the evidence at risk of being lost and that the investigation will be reopened ex officio if new evidence or facts capable of identifying the person responsible are discovered (Articles 314 and 315 of the Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure); it can be challenged by complaint within ten days. A suspension is not a closure, and that matters: the investigation remains formally open, and it is possible to ask for it to be reopened by submitting new elements. But an investigation that stops less than ten months after the facts, in a case in which the whole chain of payments is documented, says a great deal about the priorities with which medium-sized frauds are treated.

The second is the Italian proceedings concerning cryptop-market.com. After a criminal report filed in February 2022 and a request for information on registrations under Article 335 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the public prosecutor requested closure because the perpetrators remained unknown (Article 415 of the Code of Criminal Procedure). The injured party lodged an objection in January 2023. Here the procedural code sets a requirement that practice too often forgets: the objection, on pain of inadmissibility, must indicate the subject of the supplementary investigation and the relevant evidence (Article 410 of the Code of Criminal Procedure). A generic criticism is not enough, an investigative programme is required. And, in the case of unknown persons, the judge for preliminary investigations, faced with a request he does not wish to grant, has as his main tool an order for further investigations (Article 409(4) of the Code of Criminal Procedure), not an order for compulsory charges, which presupposes a suspect. The hearing in chambers was set for 22 October 2026, almost four years after the objection. We do not know the outcome.

What should a judicial authority have investigated, and could still investigate? At least four things, none of which needs a discovery. The analysis of the chain of transactions starting from the two identifiers supplied by the merchant, which are, by the merchant's own admission, public. The acquisition, from the Estonian company, of the identification documents and destination addresses of the customers, which the company states it verified with a compliance partner. The acquisition, from the Maltese payment intermediary, of the settlement flows and the crediting accounts. The examination of the contract, which contains at least two corporate names. For Estonia and Malta, EU Member States, the tool is the European Investigation Order in criminal matters (Legislative Decree 108/2017), which makes it possible to ask an authority of another Member State directly for the acquisition of documents and data; for Switzerland, letters rogatory under the mutual legal assistance conventions. These steps are slow, not impossible: their absence, in a file from 2020, is not a fatality, it is a choice of priorities that the person who suffered the damage has the right to challenge.

One last remark for colleagues on the cryptop-market.com case. The existence of two proceedings in two States for the same facts produces a bounce effect: each authority may consider that it is the other that should proceed, or that the fact, having occurred in «unspecified places», is not among its priorities. Italian jurisdiction, moreover, is established without difficulty (Article 6 of the Criminal Code) when the damage occurs in Italy, and territorial competence must be set according to Articles 8 and 9 of the Code of Criminal Procedure; the problem is not who is competent, but who takes on the burden of investigating.

The fake fund recovery: the deception awaiting those who lost money with cryptop-market.com

Whoever has lost money with cryptop-market.com is the ideal target for a second scam: the so-called «fund recovery service», which promises to trace the bitcoin with computer techniques or through foreign lawyers and asks for an advance. Whoever has waited six years, as in the case we handled, is even more vulnerable. We have shown how it works in our review of a fund recovery company that defrauded those trying to recover their losses and we have explained, in the solved case on recovery of undue payments after an online scam, which civil routes really exist. On confiscation, see our in-depth piece on confiscation of equivalent value in online scams. No serious professional asks for money in advance to unlock other people's funds, or guarantees the outcome. Another case, in which a token was sold with a «guarantee» of the capital, is that of rfcofficial.io.

What to do if you paid by card for a crypto exchange and then lost the capital

If you paid money to a platform like cryptop-market.com via an exchange or a service for buying bitcoin by card, these are the steps we recommend, in order of urgency:

• do not pay any more money to whoever manages the account, for any reason: not to «unlock» withdrawals, not to pay «taxes», not to «complete» a verification;
• keep everything: the contract, the card statements with the date and amount of each charge, the exchange receipts, the transaction identifiers on the blockchain and the wallet addresses, e-mails, chats, telephone numbers and profiles of the people involved;
• if the transaction is recent, dispute the charges with the issuing bank in writing at once, describing the facts as fraud and giving the chronology: the network deadlines do not wait;
• download and keep the complete transaction history from the wallet or the exchange, because it is the document from which any reconstruction of the flows starts;
• ask the merchant that sold the bitcoin, in writing, for the data on the transaction and the destination address: any refusal is already a useful circumstance;
• file a criminal complaint with the Public Prosecutor's Office or a judicial police office within the deadlines, attaching the documentation ordered by date and amount, and state in the document the investigations you ask to be carried out (blockchain analysis, acquisitions from foreign intermediaries): a complaint that merely narrates is hard to defend in an objection if closure is requested;
• if you have been notified of a request for closure, do not let the deadline to object pass: the objection requires specific content and must be drafted with care;
• be wary of anyone who, after the loss, offers to recover the funds by asking for an advance.

How to recognise a platform like cryptop-market.com before paying

Some signals, in the case of cryptop-market.com, were visible from the beginning, and recur in almost all platforms of the same kind:

• two-digit monthly returns, perhaps «variable» but always high, with a «broker» who takes on all the risks;
• a contract stating that the funds become the property of the company and excluding any claim over the money paid;
• a company described as «limited» and established in a prestigious European city, with no registry number, no registered office and no indication of the authority that supervises it;
• the requirement to go through an exchange or a third-party service to buy cryptocurrency by card, and the invitation to transfer it to an address indicated by the platform;
• transactions carried out with remote-access software, or with guided assistance from a «consultant» who always knows which amount to pay;
• amounts that grow with each transaction, with time-limited deadlines and «promotions»;
• exit penalties and withdrawal conditions that depend on margin requirements decided by the company.

cryptop-market.com is a scam: the final warning

The elements examined lead to a conclusion that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, we consider well founded: cryptop-market.com is a scam, in the criminal-law sense of the term. The contract of cryptop-market.com, which promises 11 to 20% a month, which turns customers' money into the company's money and which gives no verifiable information about the party proposing it, is not an investment contract; it is the tool that makes the removal of capital credible. What is missing in the file on cryptop-market.com is not proof of the deception, but the reconstruction of where the money went: work that six years on is harder but not impossible, because transactions on the blockchain are not erased and because the intermediaries that collected the money and verified the customers keep, by legal obligation, the identification data.

If you paid by card for a cryptocurrency purchase service and lost the capital on a platform like cryptop-market.com, time is not on your side: limitation periods run, traces on systems are lost and platforms change name. If you have suffered the same scam, we can help you.