PANews reported on January 15 that according to Cointelegraph, Hong Kong courts can now send tokenized legal notices to anonymous owners of illegal wallet addresses through blockchain. According to a court injunction, two wallet addresses on the Tron network have received such legal notices and have been asked to freeze their assets. Although previous cases in jurisdictions such as the United States and the United Kingdom have demonstrated the courts' ability to adapt to new methods, the tokenized notices launched in Hong Kong are particularly unique because they do not allow ignorance as a defense.
Joshua Chu, a cybersecurity consultant at Macro Systems, explained: "If the relevant transactions go ahead, it will violate criminal law. And if centralized exchanges are involved, they are likely to be cautious about these wallets and even refuse to trade with them because they need to fulfill their statutory 'anti-money laundering and know your blockchain' obligations." Traditionally, legal documents are served in person, that is, the documents are handed over to the recipient in person. In addition, some judicial regions also allow documents to be sent by registered mail, email or fax under certain conditions. If the recipient cannot be found, a notice will be published in a newspaper or on the Internet. Moses Park, the lawyer for the plaintiff in the Hong Kong case, pointed out: "Before this, under the existing procedural requirements, it was extremely challenging, if not impossible, to serve court documents to wallet holders."
The court order set up a digital cordon around the 2.65 million USDT that the victims lost due to the online fraud. However, when the suspicious wallet received the tokenization court order, the suspect had already transferred some of the assets and eventually transferred them to an exchange. As of the time of the report, there were still about 1 million USDT left in the wallet. In response, Chu said that the remaining assets were "being handled separately" and refused to disclose more information.