Repay Now or Fight It? What TCK 168 gives you for paying a fraud complainant

Article 168 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK) covers fraud, and it sets two ceilings. Which one applies to you depends on a single date.

Two conditions sit inside the text and neither is negotiable. The loss must be made good in full, either by returning the property itself or by compensating for it. And the remorse must be shown personally: the article names the perpetrator, the instigator and the accomplice, so a co-defendant who settles his own share does not carry you with him.

Partial payment is where people lose money for nothing. Under TCK 168/4, a part payment attracts the reduction only if the complainant consents to it. Without that consent, half the sum handed over buys no reduction at all, and you will not get it back.

Note the words up to. The court is not obliged to give the full two thirds; it fixes a figure inside that ceiling and must give reasons for it. Payment that is complete, prompt and unprompted is what pushes a court toward the top of the range.

Turkish criminal procedure has two phases with a hard boundary between them. Article 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CMK) defines the investigation phase as running from the moment the authorities learn of the suspicion until the indictment is accepted, and the prosecution phase as beginning with that acceptance. Article 175/1 puts it in one line: with the acceptance of the indictment the public case is opened and the prosecution phase begins.

So the two-thirds window does not close at your first hearing, and it does not close on the day you were detained or questioned. It closes on the day a criminal court accepts the prosecutor's indictment. You are rarely warned that the indictment is coming, and acceptance can follow the filing within days. In practice the decision has to be taken while you are still a suspect, often while you are still reading a file that is far from complete.

If you are held on remand while this is being weighed, the same weeks carry both questions at once, because the material that supports a release application is often the material that shapes what you should pay. The interaction is set out in the note on remand and release in Turkish criminal cases.

For the basic form of fraud there is a route that does better than any discount. CMK 253/1-b lists the offences that go to mediation whether or not they require a complaint, and item 8 on that list is fraud under TCK 157 — the simple form, carrying one to five years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to five thousand days.

If mediation succeeds and you perform your undertaking in one payment, the prosecutor issues a decision not to prosecute (CMK 253/19). There is no indictment, no trial and no conviction. If payment is deferred or spread over instalments, the prosecutor defers opening the case instead, and the case is opened only if you fail to perform.

The timetable is short. You have seven days from the mediation offer to answer, and silence is treated as refusal (CMK 253/4). The mediator has thirty days to conclude, which the mediation office may extend twice by no more than twenty days each time (CMK 253/12). And under CMK 253/18 the attempt cannot be repeated: once it fails, that door is shut.

Aggravated fraud under TCK 158 is not on the list, and under CMK 253/3 a mediation-eligible offence charged alongside an ineligible one against the same victim falls outside mediation as well. If your indictment cites Article 158 — because a bank or an information system was the vehicle, because you acted for a company, or because a public body bore the loss — then TCK 168 is the only mechanism left. The procedure itself is set out in the note on criminal mediation in Türkiye.

The percentage is not the whole value of repayment. Two of the most consequential outcomes in a Turkish criminal court are conditioned on the loss having been made good.

Deferral of the announcement of the judgment (HAGB). Under CMK 231, as amended by Law 7589 of 16 July 2026, the court may defer announcing the judgment where the sentence imposed is two years or less. One of the three conditions in 231/6 is that the loss suffered by the victim or by the public has been fully remedied by restitution, restoration or compensation. If you cannot pay at once, 231/9 allows the court to grant HAGB on condition that you pay in monthly instalments across the supervision period, which the amended 231/8 sets at five years.

Suspension of a prison sentence. TCK 51/1 allows suspension where the sentence is two years or less and you have no previous intentional conviction of more than three months. Under 51/2 the court may make suspension conditional on full compensation, and where that condition is imposed and not met, the sentence continues to be served until it is.

This is where the two-year threshold and the reduction meet. Aggravated fraud committed through a bank or an information system falls under TCK 158/1-f, and the closing sentence of 158/1 sets a floor of four years for that variant. Halved under TCK 168/2, four years becomes two — the edge of the HAGB and suspension range. Cut by two thirds under 168/1, it becomes one year and four months. A further discretionary reduction of up to one sixth is available under TCK 62. The order in which a court applies increases and reductions changes the result, so read these as an illustration of why the date matters, not as a forecast for your file. The conditions are set out in full in the note on suspended sentences and HAGB.

Repayment is irreversible, and every judge who later opens the file will see it. There are situations where it is the wrong instrument.

• You dispute the transaction itself. Turkish law does not treat compensation as a confession, and Article 168 says nothing about admitting guilt. But a court reads a file as a whole, and the defence that this was a commercial dispute rather than deception is harder to run beside a voluntary payment of the full claimed sum. You cannot hold both positions comfortably.
• The loss figure is inflated. The reduction attaches to the loss the complainant actually suffered. Complaint statements routinely fold in interest, lost profit and sums arising from a separate transaction. Paying the number in the complaint rather than the number the evidence supports costs you money and buys no additional reduction.
• There are several complainants. Where the indictment carries several counts with different victims, settling with one of them does nothing for the sentence on the counts belonging to the others.
• Your part was handing over an account or a card. A fourth paragraph added to TCK 158 by Law no. 7589 of 16 July 2026, in force from 31 July 2026, halves the sentence where participation in fraud under Article 157 or 158 was limited to giving someone else a payment card, or the information or means needed to use an account held at a bank, brokerage, payment service provider or crypto asset service provider. If that describes your role, your real exposure may be far below the figure in the complaint. See the note on money mule accounts.

None of this can be decided from the amount alone. It turns on which paragraph of Article 157 or 158 the prosecutor has chosen, how the loss is evidenced, whether you are in custody, and whether the complainant will engage at all. Those questions belong on the main page on fraud charges in Türkiye, and they should be answered before any money moves.