National Regulators Warn of Fraud Amid MiCA Migration

Seven weeks after MiCA's transitional period closed, national regulators are sharpening their warnings about fraud targeting the customers still moving off unlicensed platforms, each pointing to a different piece of the same pattern.

Since 1 July, any crypto-asset service provider without MiCA authorisation has had to stop serving EU clients and direct them toward licensed alternatives. The scale of the migration explains the opportunity: CoinDesk reports (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/08/14/mica-s-cleanup-is-creating-a-new-scam-wave-across-the-european-union) that more than 1,700 unlicensed platforms were required to stop serving EU customers, with up to 10 million users told to move their assets. The Netherlands' Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) told CoinDesk that fraudulent actors may be seeing an opportunity in this migration, specifically targeting retail investors who are actively searching for a replacement licensed provider. The AFM urged investors to verify any provider against the official ESMA register (https://www.esma.europa.eu/esmas-activities/digital-finance-and-innovation/markets-crypto-assets-regulation-mica) before transferring assets, to treat unsolicited requests for fund transfers with suspicion, and pointed to its own national register as a second point of verification alongside ESMA's, which is published as a set of CSV files. Anyone who finds those difficult to work with can search the same data through our tracker (https://www.micacryptoalliance.com/white-paper-tracker).

Austria's Financial Market Authority (FMA) issued a related but separate warning on its own website (https://www.fma.gv.at/en/end-of-the-micar-transition-period-esma-states-clear-rules-for-unauthorised-providers/), telling retail crypto users that hundreds of platforms lost their legal status on 1 July and urging them to check any provider against official databases before moving assets, or to consider transferring holdings to a self-hosted wallet, avoiding the migration step entirely.

A spokesperson for France's Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) told CoinDesk that scammers have been posing as AMF staff, convincing victims to pay upfront fees on the promise of recovering funds already stolen. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) confirmed separately that its own name and logo have been misused, including on falsified documents designed to convince users their funds were at risk.

The regulators converge on the same underlying instruction despite describing the problem from different angles: verify the specific legal entity holding MiCA authorisation, since a licence held by one group company does not automatically extend to its affiliates. A recognisable parent brand is no guarantee the entity serving you is covered. The AFM and the AMF both stated that they never ask people to transfer funds and never contact customers through private messages, so any such request is a red flag.

What to watch: with authorisation and wind-down activity still ongoing, expect further warnings from individual national competent authorities as more customers of unlicensed platforms search for a replacement provider through the autumn. A coordinated statement from ESMA covering the pattern across Member States would be the next signal that the issue is being addressed at EU level; so far the warnings have arrived one national authority at a time.