The Road to Justice: Legal Recourse After Financial Fraud
Financial fraud is not theft. A thief takes your wallet—you know who he was and what he did. A fraudster takes something more, and he does it with your consent. You signed the documents. You transferred the money. You shook his hand. This is why victims rarely seek help immediately. First they must understand that they have been defrauded at all. Then they must understand that it was not their fault.
The financial loss is painful, certainly. But it is not what paralyzes. What paralyzes is something else: the discovery that the world does not operate according to the rules one had assumed were obvious. That you can do everything right and still be robbed. That prudence, caution, a lifetime of experience—all of it proved insufficient.
Fraud is not ordinary theft. A thief takes your wallet. A fraudster takes something more—he takes your belief that you can distinguish truth from falsehood.
Then, in that darkness, the voices appear. They arrive in email inboxes, pop up in advertisements, call at improbable hours. They offer help. They say: we will recover your money. We guarantee success. We have special methods, contacts, capabilities.
This must be said plainly: in most cases, they are the next fraudsters.
They hunt wounded people. They know that someone who has been defrauded is simultaneously desperate and ashamed. That he wants to fix the situation before his family finds out. That he will pay handsomely for hope, even slim hope. The mechanism is brutal in its simplicity—the victim of the first fraud becomes the victim of the second. Sometimes, later, of a third.
How, then, to tell the difference?
There is a simple rule. Whoever promises certainty is lying. Whoever guarantees recovery of funds is lying. Whoever demands large sums upfront, before examining anything, is either lying or incompetent—which, in practice, amounts to the same thing.
An honest lawyer says: I will analyze your case. I will tell you what possibilities I see. I will also tell you what obstacles I see. And I will tell you the truth, even if that truth is difficult.
The work begins with documents. With papers that seemed meaningless on the day of the fraud—confirmations, contracts, correspondence, statements. Now any of them may prove significant. But here the first problem emerges: the internet is ephemeral. The website that existed yesterday may vanish today. The account from which messages were sent gets deleted. Traces blur, and quickly.
This is why the first task is securing evidence. Screenshots. Archived pages. Recording every address, every date, every timestamp. It is tedious work, requiring patience and method. There is nothing dramatic about it. But without it, there is no case.
Then comes the moment many victims dread: reporting to law enforcement. People fear this step. They fear the offices, the procedures, the questions that force them to admit they were fooled. They fear the police officer’s gaze, in which—rightly or not—they perceive judgment.
One must cross this threshold.
A criminal complaint is a document that sets the machinery in motion. Its quality determines whether that machinery moves smoothly or stalls at the outset. A well-prepared complaint—precise, documented, identifying specific acts and individuals—stands a better chance of being taken seriously than a vague grievance.
Civil proceedings may run in parallel. A lawsuit for damages. A motion to freeze the debtor’s assets. In international cases—and financial frauds increasingly cross borders—questions arise about jurisdiction, applicable law, the possibility of enforcing a judgment in another country.
And one more thing must be said, though it is difficult.
Many cases end in failure.
The perpetrator vanishes. The money is transferred to a jurisdiction from which recovery is impossible. Assets that theoretically exist prove unreachable. Statutes of limitations expire. Courts in different countries issue contradictory rulings.
An honest lawyer says this at the beginning, not at the end. He says: here are the chances I see. Here are the risks I see. And he asks: do you still want to proceed?
Many answer: yes.
Not always because they believe they will recover their money. Sometimes because they need to feel they did not surrender without a fight. That they did what they could. That the fraudster—even if he escapes punishment—at least had to explain himself, hide, run.
There is something important in this. A person who has been defrauded has been stripped of control over his own life. Someone else decided how to dispose of his money. Taking legal action—even when its outcome is uncertain—restores part of that control. It provides the sense that one is no longer merely an object of events but, once again, their subject.
This is not a measurable result. It cannot be captured in statistics or entered into a report. And yet—for many people I have spoken with over the years—it proves no less significant than the money itself.
In the end, there remains a question that every victim must answer alone: is it worth it?
There is no single answer. It depends on the amount, on the odds, on the costs, on whether one can bear to return to this matter again and again. It depends on what one is truly seeking—the return of money, or perhaps something else.
But one thing can be said with certainty: the decision should be made on the basis of honest information, not false promises. On the basis of truth, even uncomfortable truth.
Fraud begins with a lie. The way out of it must begin with the truth.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
