For the first time in a US federal court, a plaintiff has won a hacking case after serving court documents via an NFT airdrop. The victim, Rangan Bandyopadhyay, was tricked by hackers in December 2021 into linking his Coinbase Wallet to a fake liquidity mining pool before $971,291 was depleted from the wallet.
Now, Judge Beth Bloom of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled in favor of the plaintiff. Despite the fact that the identity of the hackers was unknown, the judge declared that they were responsible for the theft and that they would have to repay the equivalent amount plus interest accrued over time.
First incident of using NFT to deliver a notification in the US.
According to recent court documents, Bandyopadhyay issued a formal notice of legal action using non-fungible tokens. This was after Judge Bloom found it right to notify these anonymous people using NFTs as their identity and residence remain unknown. Thus, the court documents were delivered using the same on-chain addresses that they used to extract funds from the plaintiff’s wallet.
Court files show that once the funds were taken from Bandyopadhyay’s Coinbase wallet, they were moved around before eventually ending up on a Binance exchange pool. What is unclear is how the funds will be recovered now that a verdict has been reached.
However, according to Fernando Bobadilla, Bandyopadhyay’s lawyer, they hope to recover at least part of the funds. The key is in the transparency and traceability offered by the blockchain. Therefore, despite the ability to be anonymous, it is possible to see how funds move and where they end up.
In statements to the press, Bobadilla points out: “These scammers are often teams outside of the United States, and everything they tell the victim is a lie about their own identity. But what they cannot hide is the transfer of the funds through the blockchain. The ledger is there, and they cannot hide.”
Now, it remains to be seen whether the plaintiff will be successful in recovering his stolen USDT.
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*All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFT Plazas come from the personal research and experience of our site moderators and are intended for educational purposes only. People are required to fully research any product before making any type of investment.
Basil is an avid fan of blockchain technology and all its innovations, and he is passionate about sharing this narrative with his audience. He has spent over five years in the crypto space, specializing in research and creating Web3 content for various media outlets around the world.
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