The Office Was Raided and Everyone Was Detained: how Turkish prosecutors separate sales staff from organisers

Fraud sold over the telephone is defined by Article 157 of the Turkish Penal Code and carries one to five years plus a judicial fine of up to five thousand days. In a call centre file it almost never stays there. It becomes aggravated fraud under Article 158/1-f — information systems, banks or credit institutions used as the instrument of the offence — where the range is three to ten years, and for that subparagraph the statute raises the floor to four years and provides that the judicial fine cannot be less than twice the benefit obtained.

Article 158/3 then increases exposure by structure rather than by conduct. Where the offence is committed by three or more people together, the sentence is increased by half. Where it is committed within the activity of an organisation formed to commit crime, it is doubled. That is why the prosecutor's first substantive decision is not whether you made calls, but which of the following labels the file attaches to you.

• Organiser. Article 220/1 punishes those who found or manage a criminal organisation with five to ten years, provided the structure is capable of committing the intended offences. The statute requires at least three members for an organisation to exist at all.
• Member. Article 220/2 sets two to five years for membership, imposed on top of the fraud sentence, because Article 220/4 provides that offences committed within the organisation's activity are punished separately.
• Outside the hierarchy. Article 220/7 covers the person who is not inside the chain of command but knowingly and willingly assists the organisation. That person is sentenced as a member, but the sentence may be reduced by up to one third according to the nature of the assistance given.

A fourth position exists and is often the realistic one for a junior seller: aider under Article 39. An aider's sentence is halved, and in offences of this kind the result cannot exceed eight years. The difference between being written into the file as a co-perpetrator and being written in as an aider is, in practice, the difference between two very different outcomes.

Nobody is sorted on the basis of their own account of themselves. The separation is done from what was carried out of the office: scripts and rebuttal sheets, the customer database showing which leads were assigned to which extension, shift and attendance records, the payroll file, the messaging groups on seized handsets, and the company's registry filings. The questions that decide your position are narrow and factual.

• Fixed salary or commission on losses. A flat monthly wage points away from a share in the enterprise. A percentage tied to deposits, and particularly to "recovery" or top-up calls made after a client has already lost money, points towards it.
• Whether you handled a client after the first loss. The staff member who only made cold opening calls sits very differently from the one who kept a client paying once complaints began.
• Signature authority and registry entries. Whether you appear as a director, signatory or shareholder of the operating company is checked before anything you say is weighed.
• Whose name is on the accounts. Bank, payment provider or crypto accounts opened in your name are the single most damaging item, because they can generate a second charge rather than a lesser one.

That second charge is laundering under Article 282, which carries three to seven years and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days, doubled under Article 282/4 where the offence is committed within an organisation's activity. Where your involvement was genuinely confined to lending an account, note that a provision added in July 2026 as Article 158/4 halves the sentence where participation in the fraud is limited to giving another person a payment card, or the credentials or instruments needed to use an account held at a bank, brokerage, payment service provider or crypto asset service provider. Whether your file is read as an account line or as a sales line is often the whole argument; the mechanics are set out on our page on money laundering charges in Türkiye. Where the product sold was forex or securities, a separate count under Article 109/2 of the Capital Markets Law No. 6362 — unlicensed capital market activity, two to five years plus a fine of five thousand to ten thousand days — is normally directed at those running the platform rather than at the sales floor.

Custody after a raid is not the ordinary twenty-four hours. Article 91/1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure sets the base period at twenty-four hours from the moment of arrest, excluding transport time to the nearest judge, which cannot itself exceed twelve hours. Article 91/3 then allows the prosecutor to extend custody by written order in collectively committed offences, each extension not exceeding one day, for three days — a maximum of four days in total. Article 2/1-k defines a collective offence as one committed by three or more people, even without any shared intent between them, so a raided office falls inside it almost automatically.

Those four days are when the statements that define everyone's role are taken. If ten people are questioned separately about the same script, the inconsistencies between them become the prosecutor's map of the hierarchy. What you say about who trained you, who set targets and who you reported to is read against nine other accounts. The custody-stage rules, including the right to silence and to counsel before questioning, are covered on our page on being arrested in Türkiye.

For a foreign national the ground actually relied on is nearly always flight risk. That is answerable rather than decisive: Article 109/3 allows judicial control in place of remand: a ban on leaving the country (a), regular reporting to places the judge designates within the periods he sets (b), surrender of a driving licence against a receipt (d), a monetary security fixed by the judge on the prosecutor's request (f), a guarantee securing the rights of the victim (h), and house arrest (j) — where Article 109/6 provides that every two days served under that last obligation counts as one day against any eventual sentence. Surrendering a passport is not one of the listed obligations; it is offered in practice to make the ban under Article 109/3-a credible. How these applications are actually argued is set out on our page on remand and release in Turkish criminal cases.

The table below sets out the statutory positions. It is not a prediction; it is the framework a Turkish court works within.

Two further provisions move the final figure. Article 43/1 merges repeated offending against the same victim, committed at different times in the execution of a single criminal decision, into one sentence increased by between one quarter and three quarters; Article 43/2 applies the same rule where a single act reaches several victims. Where separate acts reach separate complainants, which is the ordinary call centre pattern, Article 43 does not merge them and a sentence is set for each complainant. Article 168 allows a reduction of up to two thirds where the loss is fully made good before prosecution begins, and up to one half where restitution is made after prosecution begins but before judgment; under Article 168/4, partial repayment attracts the reduction only with the victim's consent.

Restitution is therefore a real lever, but it is also an admission of the underlying conduct, and it should never be offered before the file has been read and the charge you actually face is known. The wider picture — how these investigations are built, what the platform records tend to show, and how a case moves from raid to indictment — is set out on our page on online investment fraud charges in Türkiye.