According to legal experts, whether or not the defendant gets the court notice, being served by NFT “limits what the defendant can do with the funds.”
Crypto lawyers claim that NFTs are becoming an increasingly popular way to serve defendants in blockchain-based crimes who would otherwise be impossible to find.
NFT lawsuits increased
In the last year, there have been more lawsuits over NFTs, especially when the people accused of blockchain crimes could not be reached through traditional methods.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida authorized The Crypto Lawyers’ client’s request to serve a defendant via NFT in November 2022.
While the defendant’s identity was unknown, the plaintiff accused the defendant of stealing crypto to the value of $958,648.41.
After the plaintiff showed the court a statement from a crypto investigator that confirmed the stolen cryptocurrency transactions, the judge agreed to serve this defendant via NFT because it was seen as a “reasonably calculated” way to give notice.
Agustin Barbara, managing partner of The Crypto Lawyers, said that serving a defendant via NFT is a valuable tool for blockchain-related crimes in which it is “virtually impossible to identify bad actors.”
Barbara said that summoning an unknown identity using NFT is accomplished by transferring the NFT to the blockchain wallet address of the defendant, where the stolen assets are held.
Michael Bacina, a digital asset lawyer at the Australian law firm Piper Alderman, mentioned that while the “wallet may not be used by the defendant” and the summons notification may not reach the defendant’s attention, it can limit activity on the wallet and other wallets that have interacted with it recently.
Bacina proposed that it stamps that wallet address with a black mark, meaning that all other wallet addresses that have recently transacted with that address will be deemed suspicious and their activity will be affected as well.
He noted: Businesses may not wish to accept transactions where a wallet is too close to a wallet which is accused of being involved in litigation.
Bacina also said that the “open nature of public blockchains” makes it easy to say if a wallet is being used, which is a good way to find out if the NFT serving has been seen.
In 2022, additional court orders have been served using NFTs.
In June 2022, an international law firm served a restraining order via NFT. It took only one hour between the asset recovery team airdropping the NFT to the wallet address and the freezing of $1.3 million USDC on the chain.
In the same month, Giambrone & Partners became the first law firm in the United Kingdom and Europe to receive approval from a High Court judge to serve document proceedings via an NFT.
