What Article 255 of the Criminal Code punishes
Article 255 covers fraudulent use of utilities: it punishes anyone who defrauds by using someone else's electricity, gas, water, telecommunications or other element, energy or utility, through one of three methods: using devices installed to carry out the fraud (for example, a bypass or diversion that avoids the meter), maliciously tampering with meter readings or devices, or using any other clandestine means. Unlike theft or fraud in the ordinary sense, what is defrauded is not a tangible movable item but a metered supply, which is why the Code treats it as a stand-alone property offence.
The offence requires actually benefiting from someone else's supply without payment, normally through tampering with the installation or the meter; simply failing to pay a correctly issued bill does not fall here, but within contract law or, depending on the case, other property offences.
Penalties
The basic conduct carries a fine of three to twelve months (paragraph 1). Paragraph 2 sets the same monetary cut-off used elsewhere in the title: if the amount defrauded does not exceed 400 euros, the penalty drops to a fine of one to three months. Paragraph 3 provides for a specific aggravation unrelated to the amount: where the fraud is committed to supply electricity to installations used for conduct under Article 368 (cultivating, producing or trafficking drugs), the penalty rises to six to eighteen months' imprisonment or a fine of twelve to twenty-four months, regardless of the amount defrauded — the typical scenario of indoor cannabis grows illegally tapped into the mains.
How it relates to other property offences graded by amount
Article 255 shares the 400-euro threshold with Article 247 (diversion of water), Article 254 (appropriating a lost movable item) and Article 256, which punishes with an identical structure the unauthorised use of a telecommunications terminal that causes financial loss to its owner. In all of them the basic penalty is a fine; the exceptions are items of artistic, historical, cultural or scientific value under Article 254 (six months to two years' imprisonment) and the specific aggravation in paragraph 3 of Article 255, which breaks that pattern precisely to connect the offence with the fight against drug trafficking.
Defence strategy
The defence usually focuses on establishing who actually tampered with the meter or the installation — the occupier of the property is not automatically the offender —, on precisely quantifying the defrauded consumption through expert evidence to fall below the 400-euro line, and on ruling out any purpose of supplying a drug-growing operation where the tampered electrical installation serves ordinary domestic consumption. The property crimes defence service examines these elements.