It’s becoming more commonplace for NFTs, what they are and who owns them, to be subject to debate, but they’re becoming a courtroom norm. According to lawyers specialising in cryptocurrencies, there is a lot of enthusiasm for NFTs to prosecute broader criminal activities that happen online.
Over 2022, there was a spike in the number of lawsuits filed against people for various blockchain offences, especially where they couldn’t be reached in conventional ways. Of course, a part of this growth is the rise of NFTs for otherwise legal activities.
While this is becoming a trend in the UK, NFT rights have become cause celebre in China and the United States. In the latter, the legal firm – Crypto Lawyers – it made a successful request to serve their client via NFT to the District Court of the Southern District of Florida.
The puzzling aspect of this is that the defendant isn’t known, but with the accusation being the theft of nearly $1 million, representing via NFT may be one of the few legal recourses for compensation.
According to the judge who granted the legal firm’s request to serve the defendant as an NFT, they saw it as being a calculated way to offer up legal documents for the case.
One exciting aspect of this case, is the fact that it makes a crypto wallet similar in structure to serving an individual with a court order. By submitting an NFT to a wallet address, namely one containing the stolen assets, would serve as a court order for the owner. In particular, this is a very useful method when conventional means of communication aren’t possible.
This case in Florida isn’t the first instance of this happening either. In the UK in December, England’s High Court also allowed the plaintiff to have their court order submitted to them as an NFT. The court order was a means of recovering the Bitcoin he claimed was stolen from him.
In particular, the plaintiff was one of the many victims of fraud through the fraudulent Extick Pro website. Victims were scammed into creating an account and sending crypto to their platform. According to the plaintiff, over $1.5 million worth of BTC was sent to the scammers.