Italian businessman Fabrizio D’Aloia has been granted permission by the UK High Court to serve a lawsuit using an NFT drop against individuals who misappropriated his crypto assets.
D’Aloia is the founder of the online gambling business Microgame. ‘Persons unknown’ allegedly stole roughly £190,000 worth of USD Coin and about £1.8M worth of Tether between December and the end of May from him.
The petitioner’s legal team, Giambrone & Partners, stated that the court noted crypto exchanges like Binance, Poloniex, Gate.io, OKX, and Bitkubhold hold the stolen crypto as trustees and they must take all necessary precautions to prevent its transfer or withdrawal from its platforms.
Joanna Bailey, an associate lawyer from Giambrone & Partners LLP, noted “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.”
D’Aloia is alleged to have been conned by people who used the website tda-finan.com to impersonate the online brokerage TD Ameritrade and convinced him to transfer money from his cryptocurrency wallets to trade on the platform.
The court was informed that D’Aloia’s detectives discovered that nearly all of the assets had been moved to a number of secret addresses and crypto exchanges.
The judge granted D’Aloia permission to serve the proceedings on the individuals via an NFT, which he described as a “form of airdrop into the tda-finan wallets in respect of which [D’Aloia] first made his transfer to those behind the tda-finan website.”
This is the first time NFT has been granted authority to serve court proceedings on fraudsters in Europe, and it is second only to an order issued by the New York Supreme Court in June. Law firm Holland and Knight served a temporary restraining order to a defendant in a hacking case via a NFT, becoming the first to do so.
