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UK Court Allows Serving Legal Documents Via NFTs
The ruling will allow legal proceedings against otherwise anonymous persons through their wallet addresses.
Updated May 11, 2023, 3:35 p.m. Published Jul 13, 2022, 3:06 p.m.
The High Court of England and Wales has allowed Fabrizio D'Aloia, founder of Italy-based online gambling company Microgame, to file a lawsuit against anonymous people through a non-fungible token (NFT) drop.
The move will allow D’Aloia to serve legal documents to people who are not known but connected to two digital wallets. This is significant in the crypto sector, where scams and hacks can often only be tied to wallet addresses.
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“This is so important because it shows the court's willingness to adapt to new technologies and embrace the blockchain and actually step in to help consumers where previous legislation and regulators simply could not do that,” Joanna Bailey, an associate lawyer from Giambrone & Partners LLP who worked on the case, told CoinDesk in an interview.
D’Aloia claimed to have been lured by an online brokerage into depositing about 2.1 million USDT and 230,000 USDC into two wallets that turned out to be fraudulent. The court ruling, said Bailey, allows D’Aloia to sue the people responsible for the fraudulent platform by sending the court documents through an NFT drop to the two wallets.
Binance, Poloniex, Gate.io, OKX and Bitkub have been identified by D’Aloia as holding his crypto. D’Aloia last month was granted an injunction forbidding the exchanges from moving those assets.
UPDATE (July 14, 15:27 UTC) – Corrects the spelling of Microgame.
Camomile Shumba
Camomile Shumba is a CoinDesk regulatory reporter based in the UK. Previously, Shumba interned at Business Insider and Bloomberg. Camomile has featured in Harpers Bazaar, Red, the BBC, Black Ballad, Journalism.co.uk, Cryptopolitan.com and South West Londoner.
Shumba studied politics, philosophy and economics as a combined degree at the University of East Anglia before doing a postgraduate degree in multimedia journalism. While she did her undergraduate degree she had an award-winning radio show on making a difference. She does not currently hold value in any digital currencies or projects.
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