Emerging Crypto-Asset Crimes: Digital Euro, Smart Contracts, DAOs and Influencers (2026 Guide)

The crypto-asset ecosystem has ceased to be a technological niche and has become one of the most active fronts in economic criminal law. In this guide we bring together, with an overall view, the five emerging scenarios that concentrate criminal risk in 2026: the arrival of the Digital Euro and its impact on money laundering, fraud through smart contracts, criminal liability in DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations), the criminal exposure of influencers who promote crypto-assets, and AI voice-cloning vishing, a technique already used to induce fraudulent transfers. As criminal defence lawyers for crypto-asset matters, we analyse each scenario from the dual perspective of the suspect and the victim.

1. The Digital Euro and Money Laundering

The European Central Bank is moving towards the Digital Euro, and its technical design has direct criminal consequences: unlike physical cash, the Digital Euro is programmable and traceable. Every transaction leaves a record, which greatly facilitates asset-tracing work in money laundering proceedings.

The first consequence is structural: as the use of cash declines, traditional laundering techniques become obsolete. Opaque money loses its natural medium. But shifting the risk does not eliminate it: new vulnerabilities arise linked to digital identity — whoever controls the credentials controls the funds — together with a deeper debate about the monitoring of citizens' transactions.

From the defence perspective, this new landscape demands vigilance over the balance between prosecuting crime and protecting citizens' financial privacy. Total traceability cannot become disproportionate state control over the financial lives of people who are not suspected of anything. This will be one of the main battlegrounds of the coming years, both in criminal proceedings and in compliance matters.

2. Smart Contracts: Code Failure or Computer Fraud?

"Code is Law" is the mantra of the blockchain, but the Criminal Code sits above the code. When a DeFi protocol loses its users' funds, the decisive question is whether there was a genuine security failure or planned fraud: deploying smart contracts designed with backdoors to drain funds is not a computer error, it is sophisticated computer fraud.

The boundary between negligence and intent is examined in the code itself. If a developer launches an unaudited DeFi project knowing that critical vulnerabilities exist, the line between negligence and conditional intent (dolo eventual) becomes blurred: they accepted the harmful outcome as probable and went ahead anyway. This is why pre-deployment security audits serve a dual purpose, technical and legal: they document what the promoting team knew and when they knew it.

In forensic practice, analysing the Solidity source code makes it possible to detect whether the "hack" was actually an "inside job" (rug pull) disguised as a security failure. Hidden withdrawal functions, undocumented administrator privileges or last-minute changes to the contract are indicators that turn a technical file into a criminal case.

3. DAOs: Who Is Liable in a Decentralised Organisation?

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) manage multi-million treasuries through smart contracts and token voting, with no chief executive and no registered office. When a DAO is used to launder money or defraud investors, prosecutors cannot charge the "code". The defence strategy of arguing that "it is a DAO, nobody is responsible" is failing, because attention is directed at two specific profiles:

• Key developers: those who wrote and deployed the protocol's initial code.
• Governance holders: those with enough tokens to decisively influence votes, who are starting to be treated as de facto directors of an irregular company.

The risk is aggravated where the DAO's main purpose is to commit unlawful acts — for instance, an organisation created to coordinate attacks or move stolen funds —: in that scenario, active participation in governance could be treated as membership of a criminal organisation. And there is one fact no participant should lose sight of: a vote in favour of a criminal proposal leaves an immutable trail on the blockchain that serves as incriminating evidence. The transparency of the distributed ledger, the system's great technical virtue, becomes the prosecution's main source of evidence.

4. Influencers and Crypto-Asset Promotion

The promotion of complex financial products and crypto-assets by influencers has put the CNMV (Spain's securities regulator) and the Public Prosecutor's Office on alert. Promoting a rug pull or a pyramid scheme has consequences: if the influencer receives consideration and does not verify the legality of the business, they may be regarded as a necessary cooperator or a participant for profit in an aggravated fraud offence.

The defence based on "I just read the script" is losing force. Case law is beginning to demand a heightened duty of diligence from those with the capacity to influence the assets of thousands of followers, especially when they target a young and vulnerable audience. Before accepting a crypto-asset promotion campaign, verifying the legality of the project is not a courtesy: it is the line separating legitimate advertising from participation in a fraud.

For victims, this development opens an additional avenue of claim: alongside the promoters of the fraudulent project, the liability of those who amplified it for consideration without due diligence can also be examined.

5. AI Vishing: the Cloned-Voice Scam

Vishing (voice phishing) powered by Artificial Intelligence has perfected the classic "relative in distress" scam. The pattern is recognisable: a call from an unknown number, the unmistakable voice of a distressed son or relative asking for an immediate transfer because of an emergency, and minutes later the discovery that it was all fake.

The technical barrier has disappeared: scammers only need an audio sample of around 3 seconds — taken from any video posted on social media — to train an AI that clones a voice with a realism that includes pauses and emotional intonation. Prosecution is complex because these schemes use caller-ID masking (spoofing) and international VoIP telephony, but the legal defence of victims focuses on two fronts:

• Bank liability: demanding that the bank refund the sums for failures in its anti-fraud security protocols, including voice biometric pattern analysis where available.
• Audio expert evidence: proving in court that the voice was synthetic, which allows the facts to be classified as aggravated computer fraud and defuses the argument of mere negligence by the victim.

Tracing Funds and Precautionary Measures

All of the scenarios above share a common denominator: once the funds leave, time works against the victim. Tracing stolen assets through cross-chain bridges and mixers requires state-of-the-art forensic tools and, above all, speed in applying for precautionary freezing orders at the centralised exchanges through which the funds eventually pass.

The evidentiary strategy varies with the scheme: in smart contract fraud, the source code and deployment history; in DAOs, the immutable record of votes and treasury movements; in vishing, the call records and the audio expert report. In every case, the blockchain preserves the trail of the transactions, and that permanence is the best ally of a well-directed investigation.

Defence Essentials: Suspects and Victims

For those under investigation — the developer of a failed protocol, the participant in a DAO, the content creator who promoted a project — the defence involves reconstructing what was known and when: audits commissioned, warnings received, diligence exercised before accepting a promotion. The difference between an unfortunate failure and an intentional offence is decided in those details.

For the victim, there are three priorities: acting quickly to seek the precautionary freezing of the funds, preserving all digital evidence (transactions, communications, audio recordings) and articulating claims against all those involved, from the material perpetrators to the bank whose anti-fraud protocols failed.