A few decades ago, Phil Collins sang ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight (oh lord!)’, and 41 years later, these lyrics can conceivably be transposed as the anthem for crypto-fraud victims. Today, what is ‘coming in the air tonight’ is instead the NFT, modified for use in crypto litigation and airdropped onto the blockchain as a means to serve official court documents.

In this article for City A.M., Keith Oliver and Amalia Neenan discuss the recent ground-breaking decision – the first of its kind in Europe – of Fabrizio D’Aloia v. (1) Persons Unknown (2) Binance Holdings Limited and Others.

The case concerned the founder of Microgame (an online gambling company) who fell victim to an alleged fraud, losing approximately £190,000 of USD Coin and £1.8 million of Tether to individuals claiming to operate a crypto-brokerage/trading platform using the web address, tda-finan.com.

The anonymous nature of the design of cryptocurrencies make it hard to establish the identities of those operating on the blockchain. However, faced with the usual hurdle of bringing proceedings against nameless perpetrators, in this case, the English courts did what they do best and got creative.

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