A Singapore court has ruled in favour of an American entrepreneur who had more than $7 million in cryptocurrencies stolen from him and ordered two local crypto exchanges to stop unidentified perpetrators from dealing with the tainted crypto, The Straits Times reported.
In addition, the cryptocurrency exchanges have to disclose all the information and documents related to the accounts holding the stolen cryptocurrencies.
It is a landmark case in Singapore as the court issued an interim order against persons whose identity is unknown. Additionally, the Singapore High Court granted a Mareva injunction to freeze the assets of unknown persons that included the stolen cryptocurrencies .
The plaintiff went to the Singapore court to trace and recover 109.83 Bitcoin and 1497.54 Ethereum.
He could not directly identify anyone but said that it was “any person or entity who carried out, participated in or assisted in the theft of the plaintiff's cryptocurrency assets on or around Jan 8, 2021, save for the provision of cryptocurrency hosting or trading facilities.”
A Costly Mistake
The cryptocurrencies in question were stored by him in two wallets, and he stored the private keys in a safe for recovery in case his phone was damaged or lost. He shared the code of the safe with an acquaintance when he was on a vacation in Mexico. Unfortunately, others were also present in the room and overheard the code.
He soon found that the cryptocurrencies from his two wallets were gone and suspects that someone from that room might have stolen the private keys from his safe and then went for the cryptos.
The stolen cryptocurrencies were later tracked in two Singapore-based crypto exchanges and approached the court. He cited rulings by courts in Britain and Malaysia to argue that the Singapore court does not need the identity of the perpetrators to take action.
