Online financial crimes and fraud committed with electronic means of payment—a general approach and case studies in Greece

Abstract

This article was inspired and is based on a seminar held in Athens in November 2017, under the title ‘The Life cycle of e-evidence: Handling e-evidence in online fraud cases’. This article points out some interesting issues that arose from the above seminar, and focuses especially on the topic of online financial crimes and fraud committed with electronic means of payment. The presented case law comes from Greek courts, which have dealt with online financial crimes related to money laundering, dissemination of false information and credit card fraud, covering the most important areas of concern. In particular, it covers the investigation, both physical and electronic, and the gathering of electronic evidence in both civil and criminal proceedings, the search and seizure process and methods, the handling of evidence from the authorities, the privacy issues that are raised and how e-evidence was used in courts of law.