Someone else used your Turkish account, and the file now names you as a participant.

Fraud in its basic form is TCK 157: deceiving a person by fraudulent conduct and obtaining a benefit for oneself or another, to the loss of that person or of a third party. The penalty is one to five years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to five thousand days.

Almost no account case is charged under 157. It is charged under TCK 158, qualified fraud, and usually under paragraph 1(f): the offence committed by using information systems, banks or credit institutions as an instrument. Paragraph 1(l) sits close by, where the offender presents himself as a public official or as an employee of a bank, insurance or credit institution, or says he is connected to one. That is the ordinary shape of a call-centre or investment scam.

TCK 158/1 carries three to ten years and a judicial fine of up to five thousand days. A closing sentence of that paragraph then raises the floor for sub-paragraphs (e), (f), (j), (k) and (l): the lower limit of imprisonment cannot be less than four years, and the judicial fine cannot be less than twice the benefit obtained from the offence.

Then the multipliers

• TCK 158/3 — where the offences in 157 or 158 are committed by three or more persons together, the penalty is increased by one half. Where committed within the activity of an organisation formed to commit crime, it is doubled.
• TCK 43 — chain offence. Where the same offence is committed more than once against one person at different times in execution of a single decision to offend, one penalty is imposed but increased by one quarter to three quarters. The same rule applies where a single act is committed against more than one person. Whether a file is built as one chained offence or as separate counts is often the largest single number in the case.
• TCK 61/7 — for an offence carrying a determinate term, the final sentence cannot exceed thirty years.

What English-language reporting calls a money mule has no separate name in Turkish law. There is no offence of lending out an account. The file treats you as a participant in the fraud itself, which is why the numbers above are the numbers that apply to you.

Law no. 7589 was adopted on 16 July 2026. Article 13 of it added a fourth paragraph to TCK 158. It was published in the Official Gazette on 31 July 2026 and, under the commencement article of that law, entered into force on publication.

TCK 158/4 provides that where participation in the offences in article 158 and in article 157 is limited to the act of giving another person — with the aim of obtaining an unjust benefit for oneself or for another — payment instruments such as a bank or credit card belonging to oneself or to another, or the mandatory information or instruments enabling the use of an account held at a bank, an intermediary institution, a payment service provider or a crypto-asset service provider, the penalty to be imposed is reduced by one half.

Three things about it matter more than the rest.

• It is mandatory. The wording is that the penalty is reduced, not that it may be reduced. It is not left to the court's discretion the way a good-conduct reduction is.
• It covers the account as well as the card, and it names payment service providers and crypto-asset service providers alongside banks. Handing over the access credentials of a wallet is inside the paragraph.
• It reaches backwards. Under TCK 7/2, where the law in force at the time of the offence and a later law differ, the law favourable to the offender is applied and enforced. That wording covers acts committed before 31 July 2026, files already at trial, and sentences that are already final.

What the arithmetic looks like

TCK 61/4 requires increases to be applied before reductions, and TCK 61/5 fixes the order in which the reductions then run. The sequence is not cosmetic. Applied in the wrong order it changes the years.

The reduction hangs on the word limited. It applies where your participation was confined to handing over the card, the credentials, or the information needed to operate the account. It falls away as soon as the file shows you did anything beyond that.

• Withdrawing cash at an ATM from money that had arrived.
• Making the onward transfer yourself, or converting the balance to crypto.
• Opening further accounts, in your name or in someone else's, to be used the same way.
• Finding other people willing to hand over their accounts.
• Holding the SIM card, the device or the one-time codes and passing them on as each transfer ran.

This is where these files are decided, and it is decided on records rather than on anybody's account of events: account movement, ATM camera footage, cell-site and device data, and the chat history on the phone.

The reduction is the second-best outcome, not the first

TCK 158/4 assumes you are a participant. It requires that you acted with the aim of obtaining an unjust benefit for yourself or for another. If you handed nothing over knowingly — the card was taken, the account was opened in your name using your documents, someone you trusted used credentials you had given for another purpose — then the question is not how much the sentence is reduced. It is whether the mental element exists at all. A defence that opens by asking for the reduction has already conceded the case.

An open question

TCK 39 treats a person who aids an offence as an aider and halves the penalty, subject to a ceiling of eight years. Whether the 158/4 reduction can run on top of an aiding reduction, or whether the new paragraph is meant to stand in its place, has not been settled. The paragraph entered into force on 31 July 2026 and there is no Court of Cassation authority on it yet. Anyone who states the answer is confident, not informed.

Separately from the charge there is the money, and two regimes can reach the account.

CMK 128 allows seizure of any kind of account at a bank or other financial institution where there is strong suspicion based on concrete evidence both that the offence was committed and that the asset derived from it. Fraud under 157 and 158 is on that article's catalogue. Under CMK 128/9 only a judge may order it, and an order requires a report on the value derived from the offence, prepared within three months and extendable on request by two further months.

CMK 128/A, added on 24 December 2025, is faster and its threshold is lower. On reasonable suspicion of qualified theft (142/2-e), qualified fraud (158/1-f and 158/1-l) or misuse of bank or credit cards (245):

• The bank, payment service provider or crypto-asset service provider may itself suspend the account for up to forty-eight hours. No judge and no prosecutor is involved at that point.
• The suspension and the account movements go immediately to the public prosecutor with all information and documents. The account holder is notified as well.
• The account holder may apply to the prosecutor to have the suspension lifted, and the prosecutor decides within twenty-four hours.
• Within the suspension period the funds may be seized on a judge's decision, or in urgent cases on the prosecutor's written order. A seizure made without a judge's decision is submitted for approval within twenty-four hours, and the judge announces the decision within forty-eight hours of the seizure. Failing that, the seizure lapses by itself.
• Where the money is established to belong to the victim of the offence, it is returned to them during the investigation or the trial.
• The expert report required by CMK 128 is not required on this route.

The institution that decided the suspension is not held legally liable for it. And a bank, payment service provider or crypto-asset service provider asked for information by a prosecutor, judge or court must produce it within ten days, or face an administrative fine of fifty thousand to three hundred thousand Turkish lira. The file will hold your complete account history long before you see it.

TCK 168 is the effective remorse provision for property offences, and fraud is named in it. Where the perpetrator, the instigator or the aider personally shows remorse and fully makes good the victim's loss, by returning it in kind or by compensating:

• Before prosecution begins — the penalty is reduced by up to two thirds.
• After prosecution begins but before judgment — by up to one half.
• Where the return is partial, the provision applies only with the victim's consent.

Under TCK 245/5 the same effective remorse rules apply to misuse of a bank or credit card under 245/1, which carries three to six years and a judicial fine of up to five thousand days for a person who obtains or holds another's card and uses it, or has it used, without the holder's consent.

What paying back does not do

It does not end the case. Uzlaştırma, criminal mediation under CMK 253, can close a file at the investigation stage, but the catalogue in CMK 253/1(b) lists fraud under article 157 only. Qualified fraud under article 158 is not in it. Where the charge is 158, there is no mediation route, and money paid to the victim is a sentencing argument rather than an exit.

The second file

Moving the proceeds on can be charged on its own. TCK 282/1 — taking abroad, or subjecting to various transactions in order to conceal the illegitimate source of, assets derived from an offence whose lower limit is six months or more — carries three to seven years and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days. TCK 282/2 reaches a person who did not participate in that offence but who buys, accepts, holds or uses the asset knowing what it is: two to five years. Under 282/4 the penalty is doubled where the offence is committed within the activity of a criminal organisation.

• Interpreter. Under CMK 202, a suspect, accused or victim who does not know Turkish well enough to explain himself is heard through an interpreter, and at the investigation stage that interpreter is appointed by the judge or the prosecutor. A friend translating at a bank counter is not that, and neither is a colleague at the police station.
• Statement. CMK 147 requires that the alleged offence be explained to you, that you be told you may choose a lawyer and that the bar will appoint one if you cannot, and that making no statement about the alleged offence is your legal right. A relative you name is to be informed of your detention.
• Consulate. Ask that your consulate be notified. It will not appoint or pay for a lawyer, but it can reach your family, and a family that knows where you are can instruct counsel.
• Remand. Qualified fraud is not in the CMK 100/3 catalogue where a ground for remand may be presumed. A remand order therefore needs concrete evidence of strong suspicion under CMK 100/1 and an actual ground under CMK 100/2 — flight, or interference with evidence or witnesses. For a foreign national with no registered address here, no family here and a return ticket, the flight ground does most of the work.
• Travel ban. The alternative to remand is judicial control under CMK 109, and the first measure on its list, 109/3(a), is not being able to leave the country. The same list allows a security sum fixed by the judge (109/3(f)) and a guarantee securing the victim's rights (109/3(h)). Under CMK 109/6, time under judicial control is not deducted from a sentence, except for the treatment and house-arrest measures; under house arrest, every two days count as one.
• Deportation. TCK 59 requires that a foreign national sentenced to imprisonment be reported immediately to the Ministry of the Interior, once release under probation or conditional release is decided and in any event once the sentence has been served, so that deportation can be assessed. Law no. 6458, article 54/1(a) then provides that a deportation decision shall be taken for those assessed as falling within TCK 59. Article 54/1(ç) is separate and needs no conviction at all: a deportation decision is taken for foreigners who earn their living by illegitimate means during their stay in Türkiye.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether TCK 158/4 will apply to your file. That turns on facts already recorded somewhere — which withdrawals were made and by whom, how many accounts there were, what the messages on the phone say — and on how the prosecutor frames the participation. It cannot tell you what sentence a court will reach. And on a paragraph that entered into force on 31 July 2026, it cannot tell you how the Court of Cassation will read it, because the Court of Cassation has not read it yet. What it can tell you is which questions decide the answer, and that the record answering them is being assembled now, whether or not anyone has spoken to you.