Fraudsters are impersonating EU officials and MiCA-licensed crypto exchanges

European regulators are seeing a spike in scams tied to the EU’s new crypto rulebook, Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The timing matters for high-risk payments teams: once a crypto firm loses its EU license, the fraudsters move in fast and start hunting for users who are already trying to move funds somewhere licensed.

1. France’s Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) told the Financial Times that the wave of fraud picked up immediately after 1 July, when crypto companies without a MiCA licence were supposed to stop operating in the EU.
2. The playbook is straightforward and, in practice, nasty: scammers contact customers of unlicensed firms, pose as regulators or as a licensed crypto exchange, and push them to transfer assets to a website or account actually controlled by criminals. ESMA-branded materials and forged exchange and regulator documents have been used to make the pitch look official.
3. A second stage has also become common: “recover your lost funds” offers. Fraudsters contact recent victims and ask for an upfront payment to recover assets. Regulators say they are mainly targeting users who are actively looking for a licensed provider, which makes them easier to pressure and easier to confuse.
4. The EU regulators’ advice is blunt. If someone is pushing for a faster transfer, stop the conversation and verify the firm’s authorisation yourself through ESMA’s official public register. Do not follow links sent by strangers.
5. Under MiCA, firms that missed the 1 July deadline must stop operating in the EU and tell clients to withdraw or move their assets elsewhere. By the end of July, ESMA’s register listed 323 licensed crypto companies. VASPnet estimates that more than 1700 firms have had to shut down in Europe.

Among the firms that did secure EU licences are Coinbase, Kraken, and OKX. Binance, the largest exchange by trading volume, did not obtain permission to operate in the European Union after trying several EU countries and being rejected each time. For PSPs, banks, and acquirers, that is the practical backdrop: MiCA is not just a licensing story, it is also a customer migration story — and scammers are already trading on it.