Martin Fischer
Background
Martin oversees OnlineRefundee's cross-border recovery strategy across continental Europe. He co-ordinates casework across the firm's Italian, Iberian, French, German-speaking and Benelux desks — ensuring that multi-jurisdictional cases (which now represent the majority of investment scam recoveries) are handled with a single senior point of accountability, not fragmented across national teams.
Before joining OnlineRefundee, Martin spent 11 years at BaFin, Germany's federal financial supervisor. He served in the consumer protection division as a Senior Case Officer, where he led BaFin's response to some of the highest-profile unauthorised broker platform failures of the last decade, and represented the authority on ESMA's Investor Protection Standing Committee.
Martin holds an LLM in European Financial Law from Humboldt University Berlin (2010) and a First State Examination in Law from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2008). He is admitted as a Rechtsanwalt (attorney-at-law) in Germany.
Cross-border scams don't respect borders — and the recovery response can't either. When a Portuguese victim is coerced by a Cypriot broker with an Estonian shell company holding funds at a Latvian PSP, the case succeeds or fails on how quickly the right regulators talk to each other. That's the work I lead.
Career
Areas of expertise
Languages
- German — native
- English — C2
- French — C1
- Italian — C1
- Spanish — B2
- Portuguese — B2
- Dutch — B2
Committees, memberships and appointments
- ESMA — Investor Protection Standing Committee Industry observer (as OnlineRefundee delegate), 2024 – present. Previously BaFin representative 2018 – 2023.
- European Banking Authority (EBA) Cross-border consumer complaints working group — external contributor.
- Deutsche Anwaltsverein (DAV) Member — Financial Services Law Committee.
- International Bar Association (IBA) Banking Law Committee — Individual member.
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — European Financial Law LLM programme Occasional lecturer on cross-border enforcement (guest speaker series).
Selected writing & commentary
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"When four regulators own the same fraud: co-ordinating cross-border recovery under a fragmented EU framework"
— Journal of European Financial Services Law, 2025 (peer-reviewed).
Analyses 47 cross-border broker fraud cases and proposes a lead-authority protocol. - "MiCA and consumer recoveries: what changes for scam victims from December 2024" — Contribution to the Handelsblatt Legal Briefing, 2024.
- "Chargeback pathways under PSD2 in unauthorised investment scam cases" — BaFin Working Paper, 2022 (co-authored, internal).
- Regular commentator — Financial Times Alphaville, Süddeutsche Zeitung Wirtschaft, and Il Sole 24 Ore on cross-border scam enforcement (selected pieces, 2023 – present).
Lost money to a cross-border investment scam?
Martin's team co-ordinates recoveries across all major EU jurisdictions. If your funds moved between two or more countries, we handle every regulator so you don't have to.
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