TURKEY Law and Practice Contributed by: Sera Somay, Merve Kurdak and Doğa Pınarlı Dedebaş, Paksoy
commercial activities qualifies as aggravated fraud. Actions such as intermediary institutions trading an investor’s assets without the investor’s consent or using such assets for their own benefit constitute the qualified form of the offence of abuse of trust and, similar to fraud, are punishable by imprisonment and judicial fines. 12.3 Responsibility for Losses Under Turkish law, sanctions in relation to fraud offences are generally criminal in nature and are pri - marily directed at the perpetrators of the relevant acts; responsibility for customer losses is not compre - hensively regulated on an offence-by-offence basis. Accordingly, the responsibility of fintech service pro - viders for losses is governed by general provisions, and there are cases where customers bring claims mainly against banks (given that other fintech service
providers are relatively new and established precedent is limited). In such cases, courts assess whether the bank has complied with its duties and the heightened standard of care expected from it as a trust-based financial institution (including the adequacy of security measures, authentication mechanisms and suspicious transaction monitoring). Depending on this assess - ment, courts may attribute a certain degree of fault to the financial institution and order compensation of losses accordingly. With respect to crypto-assets, the CML explicitly states that disputes arising from transactions carried out on such platforms are subject to general legal principles, that the fact that platforms are licensed by the CMB does not mean that such transactions are backed by a public guarantee, and that crypto-assets are not subject to investor compensation schemes.
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