Review of a family member's cryptocurrency scam situation (personal details removed), steps taken to gather evidence and the challenges faced toward recovery of value in the context of current infrastructure & norms surrounding Internet fraud policies. April 2023.

Christopher Clayton

04/29/2023

After a family member fell for a cryptocurrency scam involving a realistic-looking but actually non-functioning crypto exchange website, I have gone through many initial steps to work toward a monetary recovery. My aim with this summary is to describe what I've done to collect evidence & how I've outlined it, the types of relevant parties I've worked with toward a solution and the greater institutional context for smaller-scale Internet fraud victims.

I am not a lawyer, and the example scam scenario I have outlined does not constitute legal advice.

This scenario involved a family member creating an account on a fake trading website, which generated a real cryptocurrency hash address (hosted wallet mechanism) where the victim transferred cryptocurrency from a legitimate Coinbase wallet. A second hash address in a different crytocurrency was entirely generated by the fake trading site and didn't actually exist on the blockchain. The movements claimed by the hosted wallet website's account ledger after the user seemingly conducted trades between the different crytocurrency hash addresses thus didn't occur on the blockchain after all. The actual movements on the blockchain were entirely different in comparison, and the victim had no control over that activity.

The fake trading website involved a look-alike of bittrex168.com, reported by Cybertrace.com.au through Scam Adviser as a likely mainland China/Hong Kong operator [Scam Adviser]. That particular website was already defunct when this current scam took place. There are also still other websites with a similar front page and alleged trading mechanism under the claimed business name of 'BBank Global'.

Challenges Toward Recovery

As soon as the scam was identified as such, I proceeded to compile all the evidence and to understand possible solutions.

1. Finding a cryptocurrency tracing professional to document where the cryptocurrency was cashed out was necessary to serve as a source of primary documented evidence of the actual blockchain movements. In this scenario, the scammers only transferred the crytocurrency to a few successive hash addresses (simple attempt to obfuscate where the cryptocurrency was being taken) before reaching an initial cash-out point. That is, the final wallet address where the cryptocurrency was exchanged for hard currency to a bank account number.

The trickiest part for me when I conducted an amateur trace through a blockchain browser was documenting an initial currency conversion on the Tokenlon exchange, which occurred in the middle of the successive transactions. I used Etherscan.io for this purpose. Currency conversions themselves count as transaction IDs, but the resulting final cryptocurrency counts as a second set of transaction IDs. The latter set of transaction IDs must be used to continue the trace (which hash ID the crypto currency proceeded to in the next outbound transaction).

A professional tracer then formalized all of the movements for me in a way that law enforcement or Courts could understand and interpret as evidence. I selected a firm based on reviews, and that they had familiarity with this scam group according to a Scam Adviser report. This was a simple scenario, but I still saw a need to have the crypto movements formally compiled by a tracing firm for that reason.

2. Finding a potential recovery route has been the most difficult part of the situation for me. I sent initial reports to the IC3 (FBI partnership that collects Internet fraud claims) and even emailed 12321.cn (mainland China's reporting mechanism), given the possible origin of the website in mainland China or Hong Kong based on Scam Adviser's article on an identical website. I have seen no replies back as of the time of this writing (Apr 2023). This was my first attempt at getting attention for a relatively small value situation.

I had also reported the site to GoDaddy.com who claimed inability to conduct a review to release the WhoIs data because of the proxy service being a separate entity, even though they are direct partners (Domainsbyproxy.com). Domains by Proxy as of the time of this writing (Apr 2023) has no way for individuals to submit a fraud claim with evidence attachments in order to ask for a review of releasing WhoIs information. Instead, they require a subpoena or other court order to give up information. ICANN (the DNS accreditation non-profit) claimed they had no way to work with proxy services toward information collection (my case # 01154592), and cited their relevant policies as they stood as of Sept 2022 [ICANN]. However, they did work with GoDaddy (the registrar) to shut down the website.

This situation involved a final cash-out of the majority of cryptocurrency to the Binance 14 exchange wallet, which the victim had no control over. Binance.com at the time of this writing (Apr 2023) only allows Courts or police to file requests through their website, or Court-approved subpoenas. For Americans, there is no recourse to involve the Binance.US exchange in any way, given that they act as a completely different entity, or so Binance.US claimed when I talked to them.

Because of this, I attempted to find local police assistance (Seattle). Someone called me back after I initially lodged a complaint in an earlier call, but the person was not an officer or detective. I was told that unless a perpetrator was identified, no one would be assigned and referred me to the IC3 website.

This is the circular dilemma I have faced when attempting to gain Know Your Customer data (identifying information as to where the hard currency went) by a law enforcement route in an area that doesn't necessarily have the resources to go after fraud cases. There have been relatively small-value crypto cases solved via police routes involving American victims, but this occurred in states with large anti-fraud divisions, such as a dating scam example from California (Forbes). This example also resulted in Binance.com directly recovering the money without need of criminal charges.

As an alternate attempt at receiving attention, I asked a known private investigator in Seattle if I could receive help to file police reports, but I was ultimately referred to another crypto professional in Texas with federal contractor status. I still haven't heard back as of this writing if any progress has been made toward gaining Know Your Customer data or to get FBI attention (April 2023, first discussed the case and evidence with this professional in Nov 2022).

I then went back to the first cryptocurrency service I had worked with to get a reference for a lawyer. The lawyer I was referred to then introduced me to a business partner, and indicated they had other legal & police references in Hong Kong and other locations. I submitted all evidence to them along with my scenario description & outline. However, I'm still waiting for more specific ideas from them on how to make progress(April 2023).

It has been reported that 73% of all value lost by Americans to Internet fraud in 2022 was recovered [ABC News]. However, this doesn't break down how much of the total recovery involved small individual cases, versus cases that were solved together after a common perpetrator was identified, versus single large-value cases such as victimized corporate entities, and the level of involvement of non-US police jurisdictions toward these recoveries.

Ultimately, much more clearly needs to be done to create effective routes for smaller-scale victims to make recoveries from fraud, if prevention fails. Registrars, proxy services, police systems, Courts, and crypto professionals could all contribute by having more direct roles to make information accessible, and to work with victims and with each other for direct review of evidence without appealing to another authority.

Proxy domain services in particular obstruct the creation of expeditious policies toward finding out the identities of fraudsters via WhoIs revelations, as outlined in multiple high-profile cases where the Namecheap service required a subpoena in order to act [CircleID]. This same article from 2020 outlined ICANN's difficulties in finalizing a policy for proxy service accreditation. ICANN's lack of progress toward implementing any exceptions at all to absolute WhoIs proxy privacy reflects successful resistance by their DNS proxy service registrants. An example of this stance can be found on Namecheap's blog [Namecheap].

US District Court first attempt - 27 June 2023

After research, I filed a Complaint in our local District Court, which took some effort and research to set up as Pro Se Plaintiffs. I added myself and the family member as Plaintiffs without an attorney. The argument for the first Motion followed as below under 'example scenario', but in a United States context instead (planned Motion for non-attorneys to issue a subpoena to innocent third-parties).

If this does result in approval to issue a subpoena, and Binance gives up the data per their web pages stating that they require to see Court-backed or law enforcement-backed requests for information, next steps depend on the Know Your Customer data. If the bank account is in a Common Law-adjacent jurisdiction, it's likely that I will file in that jurisdiction using Mareva (freeze order) logic in tandem with Norwich Pharmacal logic (request for the Court to order that the bank give information as to where relevant financial value may have been further transferred).

Likewise, if the direct cash-out location bank accounts are shown to be citizens of the People's Republic of China, it would be most effective to file in the corresponding local People's Court instead of going through Hague Convention requests through my local Court to the Ministry of Justice.

Second US filing - 27 August 2023

The original case I filed in US District Court was thrown out due to not showing actionable cause (meeting the $75,000 USD Diversity threshold). I used a compensatory damages logic to meet that threshold besides the loss of principal (damages in conversion), which in US precedent cannot be combined together.

That was entirely my mistake and I am refiling it properly as a damages for conversion case (theft) for the principal plus gains on the logic that the lost cryptocurrency is a financial value-fluctuating asset in this context that was excluded from the victim's use due to willful fraud. This now properly meets current US precedent, and the Judge in the Order to close the case gave a lot of the context for this that I had missed. I set the value of the cryptocurrency at the price achieved around the end of the victim's trading activities on the site.

I also included a second cryptocurrency exchange that was involved in a minor cash-out, now that I am basing the claim in this way.

I could have set it even higher by choosing another price-point achieved by willing market participants at any time between the perpetration of fraud and time of filing suit, but this is primarily about recovering principal value and I wanted to keep the logic tight. That was why I tried to keep the damages requested at a minimum in the first attempt, especially considering that it may need to be filed in another jurisdiction entirely once named Defendants are identified (different possible precedents for damage awards in different countries).

As far as finally getting past the challenges of basic 'actionable cause' in the USA, now that this is hopefully on track to find actual named Defendants and their home jurisdictions, I'm not considering Mareva-style freeze order requests in the event that it involves British common law jursidictions. This is primarily based on feedback already received from the first District Court filing attempt and from doing further research. It doesn't make sense versus suing directly for money (regardless if it flows directly from the stolen value or not) because it's been so long since the original theft.

In the event of Defendants residing in the People's Republic of China, for example, there may be compensatory damages precedents with 'maximal market-determined benefits' that can be used to justify the actionable cause and for a value higher than principal. This is primarily in the context of business contracts [The Law Reviews]. This is in contrast to 'damages for conversion' which is how the Judge in the US classified our claim based on how I originally described it (a loss).

In the context of this situation, my first thought is to say that the plain and obvious use of the actually-fraudulent cryptocurrency website represents an implied contract that was not honored due to willful fraudulent misrepresentation. As far as recovery, the Civil Procedure Law allows for the state to investigate and seize funds from bank accounts and credit union accounts from Defendants who fail to pay damages in the event of a judgment against them, restricted to the amount under judgment [Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China Article 221 in English] (article number may be different in the Mandarin version).

The largest challenge of the home jurisdiction of Defendants involving mainland China is needing to put in a Hague Convention-style request between jurisdictions to serve Defendants in the context of a US case, and it must be done exactly right, followed up on and even still may take a while for the relevant People's Court to actually serve them [Harris Bricken]. That's why I would consider filing directly in the People's Republic of China using the above case logic to localize the Complaint and subsequent Motion to request judgment for compensatory damages based on the evidence of willful fraud.

US District Court acceptance of a case - 12 Sept 2023

Now what I neglected on the US District Court re-filing, still utilizing the recommended civil form for Pro Se filers at first, was to properly designate whether the cause for action was primarily a Federal Question or Diversity of Citizenship. I still marked it as primarily Diversity without understanding precedent that this generally does not allow for originating Federal cases for unknown (Doe) Defendants; citizenship must be known.

I caught this after e-filing already and thus needed the e-filing support team to strike those documents. Now I am properly classifying it as a Federal Question related to (implied) contract fraud caused by the misleading activity reports from what amounted to a cryptocurrency exchange in obvious appearance and functionality. This is essentially the implied contract argument I was already considering in the context of the People's Republic of China, if that ends up being Defendants' home national jurisdiction.

Another Federal case I reviewed (Wuluvarana v Does in the Eastern District of Wisconsin) calls out the fraudsters themselves as fraudulent commodities traders, but we don't have any specific Telegram communications related to our situation linking the messages to the particular fraudulent website. That's why I'm taking the 'fraudulent reporting' aspect of 7 U.S.C. as the relevant Federal Question instead.

This still involved my not thinking about how to frame the precedent and context of the Complaint itself to meet Federal standards. I still concentrated too much on constructing a Motion for Discovery and the evidence compilation alone based on my background doing research, rather than fully following procedurals while hinting at the greater evidence. However, the latter gets reviewed first in a legal context.

With that, finally the basic premise of the current case was accepted through the Order to Show Cause being discharged.

Motion for Discovery filing and thoughts - 24 Nov 2023

After filing the version of the District Court Complaint which was ultimately accepted, I remembered during its finalization that not all of the value I wanted to claim was associated with fully traced stolen principal. I did not trace every unit of Ethereum because the first tracing company I used charged more depending on how many hash IDs were to be investigated, and I was doubtful of recovery options then. I didn't want to spend a lot of additional money when I didn't understand recovery options.

I deliberately discounted multiple instances of fractional Ethereum send-outs, only concentrating on two more involving whole units of Ethereum. Because this case is about damages for conversion, capturing as much value as possible matters more now than before when I was still clinging to recovery options via law enforcement that never even reached a case acceptance stage. I claimed a higher value than the original principal value due to cryptocurrency's nature as a fluctuating financial asset in this context.

That meant I ultimately had to get a few final units of Ethereum formally traced. I still utilized the first tracing group that I originally contracted and obtained a second report from them. This still almost entirely lined up with what I already knew from informally following the cash-out pathways via Etherscan.io, but I still wanted to make sure all value under claim was backed up with professionalized evidence.

I also had to list another third party cryptocurrency exchange compared to the original Complaint because of the additional cash-out location involved . This brought the total to three exchanges in the final Motion for Discovery from which I seek information, not all of which have a presence in the US.

Regarding one of the exchanges, this brought up a concern about whether or not they would even abide by a US Court-approved subpoena because of their incorporation outside of the US, without any branch office or other presence in the US whatsoever, in a country which does not recognize the taking of pre-trial evidence when presented with a Letter of Request from a common law Judiciary (Hague Evidence Convention). However, I still argued for a need to subpoena them anyway toward pursuing all of the value under claim. Then other actions could be reviewed to pursue later depending on their response.

As the case currently stands, it's still set up solely to pursue the individual scammers toward a judgement for damages against them. Potentially complicating this, there are an increasing number of articles outlining how scams frequently take place in grey zone regions or corrupt regions of different countries, particularly the border of Myanmar, where workers are lured under false pretenses of stable work but who then end up forced into a front-line call center scam position (thus scammed in themselves). E.g., a lot of money has been recovered in Thailand which could be partly linked to pig butchering operations [Reuters].

That means a lawsuit like ours may turn out only to identify front-line workers who are not primarily profiting from the operations, but rather pass on most proceeds to consolidated accounts under the boss' control. However, in this context there's no choice except to find out who the initial scammers are via third-party discovery (who initially cashed out the cryptocurrency), then process serve them through asking District Court to issue a Letter of Request (Hague process service) to their home jurisdictions.

Then if it results in a judgment, it will hang over them, which at least in a mainland Chinese context (if Defendants are in mainland China) could result in all of their bank accounts and credit union accounts being actively pursued by the government, if they ignore paying a judgment voluntarily, according to the civil procedure rules. They could also choose to reveal more people as part of their (eventual) defense, who would then turn into further Defendants (further accounts where the initial scammers passed money to). In that regard I do want to see through the entire process against individual scammers, regardless of their final home jurisdictions and their particular situaton.

Per the Reuters article, another aspect to be pursued separately would be to find out if the cryptocurrency firm (Binance in our case for the vast majority of stolen principal) knows if the initial bank accounts associated with the cash-out points were raided by police. The Thai police's recovery of money, in that articlee's example, took place with Binance's cooperation. Pursuing our case's potential connections to law enforcement recoveries would be used toward making direct claims of lost principle to relevant police jurisdictions for repatriation.

However, that depends if I can receive District Court approval to ask for the redacted bank account numbers and institutions where the money originally went, and that the money was not then passed in series to further additional bank accounts. That would become a bank tracing process which I don't want to get into.

The fact that Binance has now paid fines to the CFTC, and agreed to robust third-party audit procedures to bolster review of cryptocurrency sources before users' sales requests are approved into fiat currency, brings up another parallel possibility [CFTC]. The aspect of the case involving Binance's failure to employ reasonable mechanisms toward preventing users from laundering crypto into USD, or selling crypto back into USD after obfuscating the origin of the money via a chain of crypto transactions, to me means there's now precedent that Binance can no longer be considered an 'innocent third party caught up in the actions of its users'. That's how John Doe Defendant cases or requests for Norwich Pharmacal Orders have needed to treat pass-through entities. However, Binance's guilty plea here suggests room for scam victims to launch civil suits directly against cryptocurrency exchanges, or at least particularly against Binance because of their proven lax financial control procedures.

Right now I'd have to say if I were to also pursue that avenue, I'd need to file a separate suit directly against Binance under a different Federal Question (in terms of a US filing context). I'd consider the same or similar Federal Question basis that the CFTC used in their case for the money laundering-related charge.

Second revision of Federal Question; revisiting law enforcement potential — 30 Dec 2023

This month, I filed amendments both for the Complaint and the Motion for Discovery because I failed to show that the value in controversy was a commodities future, specifically under records fraud related to futures (no options involved, only cryptocurrency deposits). This may have had a chance if I put it in the context of 'fraud by an unlicensed commodities trader' but none of the existing screenshots of Telegram messages that helped convince the victim to keep using the exchange can be tied directly to the fraudulent website (no mention of that site in the texts). I then changed the Federal Question to access device fraud, money laundering and illicit money transmission.

I justified this by indicating that the cryptocurrency keys were understood to be issued to the victim but were in fact compromised or fictitious, and are access devices because they store value that can be used to obtain currency or other things. However, the ledger activities on the site didn't match the blockchain (the fraudulent misrepresentation).

I argued it is money laundering in a Federal sense because of the mixing and tumbling used to attempt obscuring the origin of the crypto, and that it also fell under illicit money transmission because the site was not registered with FinCEN. It further involved transmission of currency substitutes by an operator (regardless of licensure) in the context of substantial US activities (taking currency substitutes from the victim). The currency substitutes all went to exchanges whose business entities are incorporated outside the US (foreign commerce was impacted).

I also had to change the Discovery request to properly phrase it as a command for the production of electronic information, not an interrogatory. Because myself and the victim are direct parties to the case, I had to make the request highly specific. That is, we need the Clerk of Court to issue documents for us to complete as needed, and then will use a professional process server to serve the subpoenas outlining the command.

After that, I finally got back in contact with the second cryptocurrency tracer after checking with the private investigator who recommended him. However, I still don't have much additional information or updated activities that he may have completed since December 2022. He claimed he switched email addresses (he did change over to a different business, admittedly) and then may have had technical issues communicating with some clients as a result.

Finally when I asked repeatedly about the status of getting any FBI attention, repeating what I've said all along about my difficulties gaining ANY sort of law enforcement attention, he finally said he had done an 'FBI consultancy' but that the dollar threshold wasn't accepted (no other details provided). This came after originally sending him my entire evidence packet all the way back last November, and despite the fact that he is (or was until Sept 2023) a registered federal contractor on SAM.gov.

Now he is interpreting my requests and the law enforcement assistance part of the contract to solely mean that he would act as a cryptocurrency consultant for a law enforcement case, once I obtained a case number and assigned personnel. However, what would be the value in having trace work re-done into his format that was already formalized by the first cryptocurrency tracer that I utilized, if not for direct support getting a case started with law enforcement personnel that he works with? I guess he did minimally fulfill working with law enforcement, but it was not as I expected based on the prior reassurance I received.

This brings me to the crux of the problem for small-scale victims. Everyone I've communicated with at exchanges, law enforcement bodies and cryptocurrency tracers has appealed to another authority when it comes to getting a law enforcement case started, including my local Seattle jurisdiction. At least the first tracer did not mention providing such assistance at all, but still wouldn't answer specific questions about how I could use the cryptocurrency information. They also still provided a 'LEO template' to suggest that there are ways in different jurisdictions to actually get cases started. The second tracer also worked with me on one, besides the apparent reassurance that I'd receive direct support gaining enforcement attention before the actual feasibility and/or mutual understanding as such came under serious question.

I have to conclude then that law enforcement action in the US won't typically happen in an individual case involving a potentially international-spanning crime of this nature, unless an agency can find a way to consolidate an individual victim's case into a larger one. Then a Victim Specialist is assigned [FBI Victim Services Division]. There is no realistic way to stride up to a law enforcement unit with such a criminal complaint, let alone to present evidence, and get anywhere with it, at least without already knowing the perpetrators. Then it still will likely need to be reviewed and consolidated into an existing case, or cases. Then maybe they will ask for the evidence back-up.

However, everyone across the industry of cryptocurrency-as-an-asset, from the centralized custodians who have pushed various cryptocurrencies into a fiat value-tied entity whose prices fluctuate based on buy and sell orders at such platforms via their price algorithms, to cryptocurrency tracers, doesn't seem to want to say much more than 'go contact law enforcement for your situation' without any other details.

That's why I was skeptical of what I could use crypto tracing information for when I first contacted the first cryptocurrency tracer, but I ultimately did it to at least have the information. Then I was subsequently convinced by the second cryptocurrency tracer that it might be possible to get Know Your Customer data via law enforcement routes (the identifying data tied to the final transaction IDs at major cryptocurrency exchanges), based on the fact that I repeatedly said that that's what I needed and received apparent confirmation.

However, based on the sum total of what I've learned and experienced, especially the actual results of utilizing a second cryptocurrency tracer with federal contractor status, it's clear that there are few ways and qualifying circumstances in the US to get an individual enforcement case started for this type of crime, besides the scant evidence in the media for pig butchering cases that went anywhere in California. Named suspects ideally need to be known, and for fraud of this nature, there's no other way I can think of besides discovery as part of a civil case.

Once I do get that information, I still want to attempt a law enforcement submission to have a parallel track toward direct recovery of principal. However, realistically, as described it may take a while and then turn into a notice of consolidation with another case, at most. In my situation, Washington State says to submit information to the IC3 which I'd have to trust would actually get back to me, versus the lack of response so far for my original report without named perpetrators. Seattle PD won't take cases involving situations outside city limits at all, which is another factor I hadn't considered, besides what they told me over the phone ('need a named perpetrator').

That also brings up the point about the second cryptocurrency tracer now saying that he only wants to act as a 'technical consultant' and is leaving me to get a law enforcement case filed entirely by myself. Then he'd presumably work with that enforcement team. This is again in spite of my indicating very different needs repeatedly and receiving enough assurance by my standards then ('will pass the case to my FBI contacts') to accept his services. It should also be pointed out that the tracers I used all wanted up-front payment (essentially Payment In Advance terms).

However, why would a cryptocurrency tracer be needed in a victim's situation that's consolidated into a larger enforcement case? Given that that's the likely outcome, if the situation gets taken up by an enforcement unit at all, the given agency likely already has consultants on such a case. Also, it wouldn't involve any cryptocurrency processes to consult on or advise on at that stage; I'd already have the Know Your Customer data by then as derived from a civil lawsuit where all the crypto evidence was processed already to discover the perpetrators, at least at the immediate cryptocurrency sales level.

This is also without considering the fact that this was always a technically simple case. There were only a few mixing and tumbling off-shoot branches in each chain to five final exchange destinations. I realized to have the first tracer formalize two of the pathways that I had left alone before due to not wanting to pay too much for tracing services when I wasn't sure how to utilize such data yet.

At that point, if this particular situation does make it into a consolidated enforcement case based on the strength of the information drawn from civil discovery, the goal would be to eventually receive information back (via the FBI Victim Specialist or another appropriate agency source) about bank tracing that identifies the victim's stolen principal, either as part of original operations to seize money from banks or to prior seizures.

Stolen value has already been recovered at scale against scam operations in Thailand that include Chinese citizen-run rings, both in terms of Thai police as well as US authorities undertaking the seizure [Thomson Reuters]. US citizens can apply for remission but the value has to be shown as tied specifically to the seized value. In a US context, after all the repeated feedback I keep receiving and what US government sources indicate, I can't think of another route to obtain that proof except by submitting a situation to the IC3 or directly to an enforcement body with the hope that it gets consolidated into an existing criminal case, or that it gets back-traced such that the stolen principal is found to overlap with a seizure from a previous case.

How else would cryptocurrency fraud victims have a chance to recover principal directly via remission, then? The Court equivalent via a Mareva (freeze) order in tandem with a Norwich Pharmacal order for discovery from a bank (the first banking entity where funds from the sale of cryptocurrency first went to), and then doing so in series as a type of bank tracing to eventually recover funds directly from the banks where the money transfers terminated, doesn't have much if any precedent in the US, at least not the 'freezing order' aspect of it. However, the freezing order component in British Common Law cases is used to prevent money from being transferred again, even if the account holder is tipped off.

All of this further emphasizes to me how much more straightforwardness and clarity is needed across the service spectrum in the cryptocurrency-as-an-asset space. Cryptocurrency exchanges have no corporate incentive, at least in terms of how corporations are still typically run, to do more than vaguely mention law enforcement, but I'm still surprised that cryptocurrency tracers can end up ultimately saying no more than that as well.

I understand not wanting to give advice concerning the law enforcement domain and thus become potentially liable for consequences, but it makes no reasonable sense to me not to at least be forthcoming about the fact that it may be unlikely in various jurisdictions for individual cases to be accepted by enforcement units, that it could hinge on the possibilities for consolidation and that having data on the perpetrators up front may be a factor. Further, that all of these factors may be overwhelming requirements in certain jurisdictions.

Handing an individual victim or a related party a 'LEO template' with little explanation of how formal cryptocurrency tracing can then be usefully utilized toward perpetrator identification and currency recovery doesn't make sense to me to build an honest service at that level, if I were a tracing service provider in that space.

Additional filing mistakes, as usual — 2/1/2024

Of course, I ended up making another fundamental mistake. Because access device fraud is only available as a charge in criminal cases, finally this refiling was closed out of hand. I'll have to refile yet again.

Because I was thrown off in the first place by the order to amend that indicated I had not shown the situation involved commodity futures, I ended up swerving into a completely different Federal Question and that was the mistake. There is established precedent for cryptocurrency as a virtual currency such that it can be treated as a commodity regardless of type or grade. It is enough that previous cases have shown that some cryptocurrencies are treated as commodity futures, thus all of them have to be treated as such.

That's all I really had to do on review; keep the same core Federal Question basis (false records under the Commodities Exchange Act) but properly address the 'commodities' part of it. I am expanding the legal logic to make sure it is definitively a right of private action under the Commodities Exchange Act as well, but now the entire basis that I've struggled with should be coming together completely.

However, because I still cannot link Telegram messages of entities purporting to be trade professionals directly to this particular site that committed fraud, I still have to argue that the swiftness and exactness of the transfer of the cryptocurrency outside of the victim's knowledge or control contradicted the ledger statements of the sites (the false records claim under the Commodities Exchange Act). The evidence only revolves around information saved from the website, versus what actually occurred on the blockchain. Using that, simply to expand the original logic, I'm arguing the site entered into a contract of sale for commodities as soon as the victim made an account on the site for the fundamental reason that cryptocurrency is a commodity in this context (virtual currency). Because the unknown Defendants are connected to the site, they were connected to the making of the contract of sale and thus violated it through the cover of the site's fraudulent misrepresentation.

The base logic was accepted originally, but because I was eventually found wanting for not mentioning how cryptocurrency is a commodity, this is the primary correction, alongside tying this to a private right of action basis (Defendants were connected to the making of this contract and violated it via fraudulent misrepresentation). I did preserve some of the 'device' logic as it pertained to the cryptocurrency wallets being compromised on the 'to employ any device, scheme or artifice' allowance.

I also am adding in other elements as to why I find the relationship between the fraudulent site and the victim amounted to a commodity futures contract more specifically as part of the overall substance argument, such as the fact that USDT was seemingly made consistently available for trade at platform-offered prices and that because the victim made a higher profit than can be expected in the well-regulated market for his original cryptocurrency (ETH), the site was controlling the offered prices to some extent. For that purpose, I explicitly stated the total profit the site reported versus what the victim roughly would have made had he sold it even at a maximum established market value at the end of his period of trading on the site (citing statistical aggregation sources such as Yahoo Finance and Google Finance). The market-reported price at the end of his trading activity was the general basis I used for the damages for conversion total in the first place.

I'm not going to try to tie that to any further legal argument explicitly, but wanted to add more information about how the entire scheme worked to finally put this actionable cause issue to rest. That includes a PDF copy of the entire transaction log showing the original deposits, seeming execution of trades by the site and resulting USDT from those trades, including all entries of the site taking an apparent fee for those trade executions, which I hadn't docketed before (only provided a screenshot covering the final account status, with some examples of these other transactions).

Motion for Discovery re-formalization thoughts - 3/6/2024

The latest Complaint still hasn't been reviewed and accepted by the Judge, but I went through rethinking the entire Motion for Discovery strategy in the meantime.

When I filed my first Discovery attempt, I didn't think about parent versus subsidiary entities all the way through. In most cases, I asked the Court to submit Letters of Request under Hague Evidence Convention Article 2 because of the target jurisdictions being amenable to qualified exclusions for pre-trial discovery under Article 23. However, I didn't go through an entire cross-jurisdictional reasoning, and I still asked for approval to subpoena electronic information from a US entity in one case which likely would have fallen afoul of strict standards to pierce the corporate veil in the US. The Discovery attempt didn't even get to that level of analysis by the Judge anyway because of the other issues.

Instead in this re-conception, given that cryptocurrency platforms normally have admixed numbers of legal entities and don't even declare a headquarters, I looked for which legal entity has operational control. E.g., Binance declares outright on their UK sub-page that Nest Services Limited is responsible for Platform Services [Binance]. I looked up precedent in the UK for limited liability of parent companies for their subsidiaries under narrow circumstances for the second platform whose web operations were also listed in the UK on its Contact page, without any other way to tell which legal entity was responsible for certain users in the context of pseudonymous platform users who harmed third parties. I also found current legal precedent in the UK for cryptocurrency suits involving pseudonymous users.

I made the same logic for the third platform in respect to a Hong Kong entity where the cryptocurrency platform did not list any operational entity but listed its user venue for arbitration in Hong Kong, and that the immediate ownership group (a Hong Kong holding company) listed that it was involved in cryptocurrency trust services with a link to the platform. Then I looked up matching precedent in Hong Kong for limited liability of parents for their subsidiaries, Norwich precedent to trigger exemptions under privacy law as well as recent cryptocurrency cases that have set up the same precedent for cryptocurrency as personal property as the UK.

All of this means getting the US Judge to write Letters to these other Court systems which then need to review it, but there's no other choice that I can see with very strict standards to pierce the corporate veil (difficult to go after US subsidiaries), and in most cases I have no US subsidiary that could even be targeted.

Because many cryptocurrency platforms I have reviewed lump all of their legal entities together under the same platform domain with only top-level statements about how they geofence users under the different legal entities (no way to distinguish users in a pseudonymous situation), with privacy and enforcement policies all described at the platform level alone, I think there is a case to say in such situations that all associated legal entities of such platforms are all affiliates. That is how FinCEN in the US categorized Binance.US in its Consent Order. However, I am throwing in the duty of care argument for parents toward their subsidiaries, with one legal entity called out as particularly responsible for such and such operational reasons in respect to each platform, to increase the chance that I have standing to get the specific user data tied to specific and proven wrongdoing in a UK and HK context. I've determined they are the most appropriate discovery/disclosure jurisdictions due to the organizational evidence from the platforms' own policies pointing to the operational entities being in those jurisdictions; two in the UK and one in HK.

Further insight into FBI case acceptance in particular - 4/16/2024

NPR reported that the FBI successfully froze fraudulently-obtained Americans' funds at a 71% success rate against $758 million investigated (NPR). However, this was out of $12.5 billion total reported in Internet-related fraud; a real recovery rate of 4.4%.

First of all, this suggests that ABC's report for the 73% "recovery rate" from 2022 must have also been against a comparatively low "actually investigated" segment from the total reported fraud of $10.3b. I looked at ABC's report again, and couldn't find any qualifying statements about what was meant by 73%. I originally assumed it was a 73% recovery against all reported Internet fraud.

Secondly, it suggests that the FBI, for fraud actually investigated, is checking if the funds are still at the initial location to which they were traced or known to have gone, and then they make a freeze order to the entity storing the funds (or equivalent value in cryptocurrency, or another currency-like vehicle). Meaning that the FBI either does not have the resources to investigate further into scenarios requiring bank tracing where the assets were transferred to a bank account or a chain of bank accounts to further attempt to obscure where funds went, or they do not want to spend resources on these extended tracing activities. I can see how that could involve the FBI needing to submit discovery motions in Court for bank information, which may turn into multiple hops and jumps to different banks and different branching chains, requiring multiple rounds of discovery.

Even so, I'm still in disbelief that the second cryptocurrency tracer I used with Federal contractor status could not have given more insight into the US law enforcement process, and actual acceptance rates for individual cases, before I agreed paying to allow the first cryptocurrency tracer's report to be reformatted (going ahead with additional services). The entire communication and acceptance of services was based on the premise of assistance gaining law enforcement attention, i.e. putting the trace evidence in that tracer's name for that purpose.

I don't care about the actual results because it would have been in the purview of law enforcement that the cryptocurrency tracer couldn't control. However, I expected some details and more information to help with my process, in the least.

To me, it simply isn't honest as a service provider to take an individual case if the need of the customer has a low chance of being fulfilled, and that details under any circumstance cannot be divulged. It could be the case that law enforcement processes or conclusions cannot be revealed at all, but I wasn't told that either way as part of the single statement that I eventually received.

I should have done more of my own research before, which finally clued me in more to the FBI's process as I've outlined previously, but to me that doesn't excuse a knowledgeable service provider's lack of providing information on that very topic of concern. Especially when I had already detailed the difficulty of finding local police assistance as part of initial communications before I paid for any additional cryptocurrency trace assistance, alongside repeatedly stating that I primarily needed help attaining law enforcement assistance at that point.

Approval to pursue discovery by US District Court - 5/29/2024

Finally, I was approved to seek discovery from the cryptocurrency exchanges (serve subpoenas). No comment or approvals were made regarding process service under the method I requested, that the Court issue Letters of Request to the jurisdictions of legal entities that I found relevantly associated with the platforms.

That put me in the same situation of how to serve subpoenas to wholly online entities in a judicial sense. For now, in a private, non-judicial capacity, I had blank subpoena forms stamped by the Clerk's Office issued to me and then constructed subpoenas addressed to the online platforms themselves, and sent them along with US FRCP Rule 4 Waivers (for their consideration to waive having to be officially summoned by Court) to the most relevant email contacts I could find. Binance in particular hides behind a 'law enforcement communication service' now, which I cannot log into, so I will contend that emailing the notice of a subpoena to that service counts as notification to Binance (sent notice to a responsible forwarding agent).

After that, the question of what to do about officially 'summoning' the platforms as online entities persists. I could ask the Court to allow alternate service of process in each circumstance that summons is not timely waived, and have the contents of my web entity-addressed subpoenas approved for that purpose. Then I'd need to utilize a process server to make electronic service because I'm a direct party to the case.

However, at least immediately, I'm going to file my status report concerning the private, non-judicial notices I sent. Then in tandem file a motion for discovery for alternate service via the Hague Convention where I'll refer to my original cross-jurisdictional concerns and reasoning as to which legal entities to target as part of asking the Court to approve that it can act as Applicant on Hague Evidence Model Forms. I have filled them out for review. Then I'd be able to have the Clerk's Office stamp documents and submit to the Central Authorities. I don't know of another method to guarantee proper service of process in a judicial sense and meet the requirements of other jurisdictions regarding online platforms, even though there are plenty of timeliness and responsiveness concerns surrounding Hague Evidence.

I will also consider arbitration for proportionate equitable relief should be decided judicially by now (seeking an order from an arbitrator to disclose the data that can be enforced in a relevant Court, i.e. with an arbitrator in the UK regarding Nest Services Limited). However, I can't see a way around such a process needing to be commercial arbitration which is more expensive for the claimant to start versus consumer arbitration, although those fees could be awarded back in a favorable judgment.

6/7/2024 - It turned out upon doing basic additional review that Nest Services Limited in the UK is a dormant company not associated with Binance (actual filing details on gov.uk, and the incorporation date was well before Binance ever began operations). That was a big miss on my part after all the research I did on the second and third cryptocurrency exchanges involved as third parties in this situation! That means I'm correcting the Motion for alternate service and will re-file it; good that I caught this anyway.

Binance's Nest Services Limited is actually in the Republic of Seychelles, and likely does only deal with UK users. This is the typical organizational opacity that cryptocurrency firms are deploying by not showing office or mailbox addresses, and having so many legal entities. However, the UK case precedent I already established in the Motion for discovery still applies to justify alternate service through the Hague Evidence Convention. Binance Holdings Limited is in the Cayman Islands (a UK overseas territory with its own judiciary but which considers UK case precedent). There's also Grand Court case precedent which further defined the ability to seek discovery under Norwich precedent even to advance a foreign case. I had already outlined the UK case logic in relation to the second cryptocurrency exchange I'm targeting (CEX.IO) relative to its relative expertise as the web services operator compared to the other entities that are otherwise the same relative business, and the inability to target any specific legal entity that supposedly handles specific batches of users in a situation involving pseudonymous data.

I originally named Binance Holdings Limited in my first Motion for Discovery attempt as the third party legal entity until all of the Federal Question re-work distracted me, and then I questioned whether the data 'exists' in the Cayman Islands jurisdiction in the context of Cayman being an offshore financial jurisdiction. However, there's no other conclusion except that data exists in that jurisdiction because Binance Holdings Limited has access to user data for the foregoing reasons.

Approval to service third parties by mail – 7/17/2024

I achieved a narrow ruling, allowing me to serve third party legal entities that I found to be relevant through registered mail to their addresses, which meets Hague Evidence Convention Article 10(a) (those jurisdictions do not explicitly object to mail service). I went ahead and redated the subpoenas to be in line with Rule 12 plus some extra time allotted, and included the Complaint, current Orders, main technical evidence, Coinbase ledger and fraudulent website screenshots and sent them via USPS. This is probably more than needed but I wanted to make sure enough was sent.

The entire service by email logic was thrown out because I had found physical addresses, and substituted service was not considered as valid to US subsidiaries of Binance even though Binance.US in the least has been shown in other cases to be an alter ego. It didn't meet extraordinary cause in this case to utilize a US substitute of that nature. I'm taking all this to mean that my arguments weren't necessarily ineffective, but simply didn't rise to the necessary level in terms of subject matter at stake. The fact that this involves third parties and not direct Defendants probably contributed to this logic. I don't see a need to argue for substitute service upon attorneys involved in previous of the legal entities' US cases, which may survive scrutiny, if I'm already allowed to fulfill mail service.

As far as the Hague Evidence Convention Article 23 matters that I brought up, it was only mentioned in terms of the Court agreeing that international comity is respected by the Court, but terminated any consideration in my Motion for the Court to act as Applicant on Hague Evidence Model Forms. At least in terms of how I argued it at this time in that Motion. Because of that ruling, I started to email the Central Authorities by myself but it's a mixed bag so far of their possibly considering to process it with the Plaintiff as Applicant, to referring to the US's Central Authority requiring that a court official, attorney or other person allowed in the court rules has to act as Applicant, alongside physically mailing multiple copies of the documents to be served.

I also had not addressed personal jurisdiction, which I'll do in the affidavit of service once I receive the USPS delivery confirmations from the tracking numbers. The platforms, which run cryptocurrency wallets acting as exchanges, and thus the relevant legal entities that have operational control over them, entered into a contract with the victim as soon as intermediaries fraudulently transferred the cryptocurrency from him. It may be an indirect and unwitting contract, but that still establishes that a contract was tendered by users of these platforms via fraud. That established business contact with the victim's forum (Washington State).

Notes on continued non-judicial communication with third-party cryptocurrency businesses - 8/14/2024

Now that all of the principal places of businesses of these cryptocurrency platforms were finally served with subpoenas via registered mail throughout July and early August, two of them replied to me. Albeit, they only replied in relation to non-judicial emails I had sent out and didn't reference the registered mail (the approved judicial service).

Their respective counter-assertions effectively state that each of the platforms' relative off-shore entities for 'all other users not covered by another entity' are the 'data controllers' and thus they need to be targeted. One of the principal places of business of one of the platforms is willing to look into it further, but that was still its first assertion. Never-mind that because these platforms have utilized multiple geofencing entities even before the transactions in controversy, I couldn't assume which one was most relevant compared to the pseudonymous nature of the data in controversy as it's currently known.

I'm not inclined to negotiate a whole lot about changing the targeted entity because I've already been at trying to get this fundamental, limited-scope level of data for a while, and I cannot see why a principal place of business with corporate officers domiciled in the same jurisdiction cannot access the data. To me, that amounts to knowing your customers (your source of revenue) so it's something of a problem of your own making if the data is in another jurisdiction under different laws, supposedly. You organized your corporate structure that way so it shouldn't matter what the data privacy laws or blocking statutes of those other jurisdictions are. You have a duty as the beneficial owner of the platform to maintain this data or have access to it, at least relative to the US Bank Secrecy Act and I have argued for personal jurisdiction in the US due to business contact with the Washington State forum, however unwittingly.

The US Bank Secrecy Act's Know Your Customer requirements for a money transmission business should then apply, if not common law principals given how integral this data is toward pursuing unknown persons that have been shown in the technical evidence as having moved the cryptocurrency to these platforms. The platform systems substantively did business in the US, whether registered with FinCEN or not, by intaking electronic transfers from the unknown persons as fraudulent intermediaries regarding cryptocurrency that was taken from a US citizen. Thus, relevant entities associated with the platforms had such business contact, and the Know Your Customer duties flow from the original Federal Question (tort harm under the Commodities Exchange Act with a right of private action to pursue the unknown persons).

I don't have the personal jurisdiction argument judicially approved or recognized yet (added it as a supplement to the affidavits of service), but it should be reviewed if I have to file any Motions for Contempt or Motions to Compel. Because I find that US personal jurisdiction applies, this web of different privacy laws at the principal places of business versus wherever the data may be actually stored in each situation, and whether the off-shore entities that supposedly control the data are in still yet different places with yet different privacy protection laws, don't apply either in a US context. I had already pointed out that although moving through the formal Hague Evidence Convention procedure may be ideal, in a US jurisdictional context, it is not a means of first resort per US Supreme Court precedent (the Aerospatiale case).

I also argued for principal place of business as defined in the Hertz Corp. decision, albeit in terms of justifying which entities were targeted. That is, those entities act as the operators of the core cryptocurrency trade and custody services, and have corporate officers in those jurisdictions. Save one of the three (Binance) where the holding company through which corporate officers make decisions is in a relative off-shore jurisdiction because the officers aren't there, but the officers themselves are scattered around the globe, and the other entities of the business structure are geofencing entities. One of which, the one for 'all other users not served by an entity in a local regulated jurisdiction', didn't exist during the events in controversy.

I am willing to negotiate on the exact entity to target, as long as a decent explanation is given as to why that entity is a valid data controller, especially when all of the three platforms related to this case as third parties (so far) have privacy policies stipulating that any related platform entities may share data with one another. Further, all of those policies state that information may be shared with public authorities such as Courts or law enforcement as appropriate. Because it would help these businesses more than anything if I targeted those entities rather than the respective principal places of business to either keep delaying, provide legitimacy to their business structure or to have more time to prepare responsive pleadings with the Court (if they even are taking this seriously enough to do that), I want to at least see agreements that service by email to those other entities would be mutually acceptable ('alternate service' in a US Federal Rules of Procedure context) so I can fill in more blank subpoena forms using the issued copy I already have from the Court for this type of purpose, and email them. Then I'd at least have some basis to justify after the fact how those subpoenas flowed from these negotiations that came out of registered mail sent to the principal places of business that I was judicially granted to subpoena. Also, I'm not going to concede that the principal place of business somehow cannot be targeted at all.

I have been getting stalled so much on attaining this data and now feel I have a competent argument for personal jurisdiction over the principal places of business that I don't see this as negotiating with unfair leverage. Either start negotiating or the Court will decide if contempt or compelling discovery may be warranted, and I feel I have a strong case for either of those results now. Maybe contempt isn't warranted yet, but further non-response from a finding to compel the entities may trigger that.

All of this is reminiscent of negotiation in interpersonal connections that I've been through. If I have a concern stemming from built-up attachment anxiety and bring it up from the perspective of a matter of fact way at first, along with my suggestions for what to do about it alongside entreating alternate suggestions, but the other person doesn't want to consider my situation as legitimate through willingness to find a compromise or mutual solution, we have a fundamental issue at the core of the connection. That's when I feel justified in judging the other person because they are then fully aware of harm caused and were given an opportunity to do something about it. This is similar in asking for proportionate equitable relief from a corporation over harms caused by their users which they may not have known about, but by the time they receive a subpoena, they know and have no more judicial excuse to claim ignorance of the fraudulent activity. The difference is there's a legal basis to potentially join them to a case as first-parties and then pursue economic damages if they are so informed and still won't provide proportionate equitable relief. In this case, I'm going out of my way to negotiate over and to justify proportionate equitable relief in the form of fundamental user data of limited scope, both judicially and non-judicially.

We'll see if any of these platforms are willing to negotiate (still cannot tell in some cases who is emailing me), but one platform has already effectively gone back to repeating their constant refrain of wanting third-party victims to contact law enforcement after I sent my initial terms to even consider targeting their off-shore platform entity instead. I cannot find any evidence of any corporate officers actually being in that jurisdiction, and it's not the entity self-described as the custody and trade service provider. The immediate parent entity describes itself that way on its own site, and links to the platform.

Identification of one user - 9/4/2024

Finally, a few weeks ago, one of the cryptocurrency exchanges disclosed information about the account where part of the cryptocurrency was taken, both in English and Mandarin (name, physical address, email address, phone number, passport, birthday). I redacted the passport number to four digits (not sure if that was strictly required) and redacted the birthday to the year only as part of a Motion for Joinder. This has now gone full-circle back to the educated guess of possible perpetrators in mainland China; it is someone with a passport address in China.

This came from the cryptocurrency platform that I have been referring to as the 'second one'. It was CEX.IO so they have been the most generally helpful so far, and I knew they had a proper Know Your Customer system from making a test account with them. This was still a year-long effort to get information, though.

As part of a Motion for Joinder, I then had to describe potential issues serving formal process in mainland China (formal judicial review required via its Central Authority) and asked for authorization to use alternatives to serve summons (go ahead with direct registered mail anyway even though this is incongruous with China's stance, or use email). It's entirely Internet-based fraud but I probably have to go through registered mail in the least for proper service in a US context, or attempt it as the means of first resort, but we'll see.

That leaves the other exchanges unresponsive where the third exchange has only ever stalled or made excuses via email. That is still the case despite an assurance recently that the command for information is now being 'escalated'. This has all been an email exchange without acknowledgement on their part regarding the registered mail. It has been more than 30 days since its principal place of business' receipt of the mail, a general standard for response, so I'm about ready to file a Motion for Contempt. The 'third one' as I've referred to it until now is OKX, and I argued that OKG Technology Holdings Limited is its actual principal place of business by all definitions given that the corporate officers domicile there, it self-describes on its site as a custody and trade service operator with a link to OKX, and OKX's primary entity is in the Republic of Seychelles (no evidence it is anything more than a relative off-shore international business registration).

Binance has also not responded at all in any way via email or otherwise, which is where the vast majority of the converted cryptocurrency was sent, and it is coming up on 30 days since its registered Cayman agent's receipt of the mail. I had to pay the Cayman registry last-minute to find out its current registered agent because it's changed since other recent US cases against Binance and the P.O. box it has on file with the USPTO is apparently defunct. The Cayman Airport Post Office had told me there are a number of packages sitting around for that P.O. Box and likely won't get resolved unless the senders actively reconcile it, given that finding out companies' registered agents is technically not public information. The post office clearly won't voluntarily figure it out and redirect.

In any case, Binance has had the registered mail by all definitions and in my argument, its Cayman registration is all that can be construed as a principal place of business despite being an off-shore location because it doesn't have a relative on-shore business in any way, and the executive officers are all in unrelated jurisdictions. So I'm about ready to file a Motion for Contempt in that scenario as well. In these Motions, I'm at least asking that the exchanges be compelled to provide discovery, even if contempt cannot be found at this point. I need the information from them in order to distinguish all unknown persons so this is a set-up for later Motions against the unresponsive entities if information still isn't forthcoming.

Beginning to clean up a side matter - 9/7/2024

The second cryptocurrency service I contacted, with whom I made clear that I needed help attaining initial law enforcement contact in the first place and said it could do that using its Federal contractor status, but which subsequently failed to ever give much of an update, disappointed me so much that I started mediation and arbitration attempts. It absolutely didn't sit right with me that what I primarily needed wasn't fulfilled. The meeting of the minds concerning doing any cryptocurrency trace re-work was clearly stipulated as only needed toward formatting the situation for the service's third-party contacts.

I didn't end up getting an update until ten months later and had to bother the private investigative service that originally referred me even to get that much of a reply. There was no proof that the FBI was 'consulted' but the service did claim they were consulted at some point. Also, the service was supposed to contact Coinbase on my behalf in the least per a second meeting of the minds and contract, yet that wasn't even mentioned. Let alone any meeting minutes or other proof, or when these activities took place.

The counter-argument I received was that the service cannot control law enforcement results, but that wasn't the point. The point was to at least make an attempt as it said it would, and a specifically defined (but anonymous) law enforcement contact was quoted as the one to whom the case would be 'passed'. Then I found out later how the FBI hardly even accepts many cases at all. The service also argued in effect that I should have been finding my own law enforcement contacts to have a ready-made connection for it, but I never mutually agreed to that and it wasn't the scope of what I asked for and was apparently offered. The offer for the service to initiate contact on my behalf using ITS connections was not rescinded in any way during contract consideration (up until I signed the contract and paid the corresponding invoice),

That's why I ultimately attempted mediation and arbitration on that narrow topic because that was the soul of the entire services contract, but because the service was unresponsive to these voluntary attempts, I had to make an Application with the service's county district court jurisdiction. I'm arguing that the matter of proportionate equitable relief (providing proof that these critical contract points were even attempted at all), but if not that arbitration be compelled in a manner that I can re-open the arbitration case that I made.

This is all so reflective of what I constantly see in my personal life. Someone benefits from me in a way I find to be disproportionate only because I'm not especially assertive, especially when I'm still getting to know someone or the other person is taking most of the initiative. However, when I bring up the issue, it is not treated as legitimate and it doesn't matter how I argue it. Of course, then people get put off by how much I argue for my feelings or my situation being legitimate and describing how I was impacted, but that's the reality of a healthy social contract. Talk about it and help find a more equal balance, or be willing to put effort toward reaching a compromise!

In this situation, though, it was not an emotional personal connection but a business one and thus I ultimately had to turn this into a legal side-controversy regarding non-fulfillment of the contract after receiving so many non-responses.

I concede that the first contract point concerning cryptocurrency tracing was completed, even though by itself additional tracing was useless to me and still is, but it was meant to go toward the service itself contacting third parties on my behalf using its own channels of communication as a Federal contractor. If I didn't coordinate with suppliers on contract and shipping topics, and create reports and/or forward the communications on to my department managers and Sales personnel in my supply planning job, I would have been fired! Why should a consulting service get a pass over this?

I strongly believe I didn't receive what I paid for in actuality as a result. I wouldn't say it was a fraudulent pretext to get easy cryptocurrency tracing dollars off of me without actually doing any original work, but it felt like it and it's hard to tell what really happened. The service claimed its email address changed for a while which may have impacted communications, but then didn't give me any status updates or proof of service for activities that may have been completed since the email change took place.

In the first place, how difficult is it to contact law enforcement and put a report together when you are the one with those professional connections? That's why I'm especially not pleased with this non-responsive and counter-argumentative behavior because I don't feel I asked for very much, and that's also typical of me in personal connections as well. In this situation, I had already tried multiple times to get law enforcement attention via various routes (Seattle PD, IC3, Federal Trade Commission) but I was ultimately dealing with routes of contact where the other side didn't even ask for detailed evidence or never replied to me at all. There's no way to submit detailed evidence up-front via those reporting routes so it's not as if having formalized trace evidence or not was a factor.

The whole matter of then waiting for the second cryptocurrency trace service to give me ANY feedback at all delayed me from considering taking legal action against the Does instead and starting this entire mess of learning legal skills ad hoc. That means it affected finding resolution for my family member, which is also what bothered me enough into taking all of the additional steps as described. We'll see what the county district court has to say about my filing which was accepted by the clerk.

The matter of personal jurisdiction - 10/2/2024

The current logic in implicit contract relations to the victim were not accepted alone as a basis for personal jurisdiction, both in relation to being able to serve process under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to the identified non-US Defendant in particular and to achieve judicial remedies regarding the non-response of non-US third parties to subpoenas.

In the first place, this meant going back to the Commodity Exchange Act from the perspective of its Federal Statute long-arm clause. There is recent precedent which limits its reach to a national and not a global reach without further justification of venue, so minimum contact with the forum (State and/or the US as a whole) is needed. In the next filing I went into how the Doe Defendants purposefully availed themselves of Washington State through the victim's use of the website in controversy (either in operating it or otherwise benefitting) as applicable to Washington State's own long-arm Statute (Defendants can be served whether residents/citizens or not for tortious activity committed in the State) on that basis. There is long-arm precedent in the Southern District of New York regarding commercial activity (purchases) on a website resulting in harm in that forum as a basis for properness of such a venue, despite the virtual nature of the activity.

There is also precedent now for a cryptocurrency trade website utilizing servers in the US as establishing their purposeful availment of the US in a way directly related to tortious activities, and the fraudulent website in this situation completely utilized US DNS servers (victim necessarily logged in and completed session activities through US infrastructure). That is the other purposeful availment component in terms of the perpetrators virtually operating in the US. The current precedent specifically has to do with US users of Binance.com executing buy orders through Binance which has most of its server infrastructure in the US, and indeed it utilizes mostly Amazon Web Services servers in the US for its DNS connection processing.

That precedent specifically relates to the Plaintiffs having made buy orders and their plausibly having been matched with sell orders on Binance infrastructure in the US within the context of a claim under the Securities Exchange Act, whose potentially global reach in a right of private action is also limited by other precedent. However, to me the DNS server logic in terms of purposeful availment of the US as a forum where login and session activity was processed applies to my family member's situation as well.

Then next was coming up with an argument to justify specific personal jurisdiction over cryptocurrency platforms for proportionate equitable relief, or other judicial remedies regarding their beneficial owners' non-responses to the subpoenas I sent. I still used Bank Secrecy Act responsibilities as arising from responsibility to Washington State over the offending users who did avail Washington State as a forum for their fraud, but this is more akin to an effects logic which doesn't have a lot of precedent in the US, especially not for digital asset cases. Also, only Binance out of the platforms in controversy in this situation can be said to have done business directly in Washington State. The primary logic had to come down to the perpetrators most likely having made use of the platforms' US DNS infrastructure to log in and sustain account sessions to intake the victims' cryptocurrency into their web-mediated accounts on the platforms. Thus, the activity is likely directly related to the platforms' purposeful availment of US infrastructure.

Personal jurisdiction not found over third-party beneficial owners of cryptocurrency platforms – 11/24/2024

Now despite precedent for cryptocurrency firms having liability in US court cases via minimum contact with the US through use of US-based DNS infrastructure, because I was arguing for proportionate equitable relief from the three firms involved this case in their status as third parties and that they don't own the DNS infrastructure were too great of factors for personal jurisdiction to be found. However, I' satisfied that I used cutting-edge precedent to press it as far as I could go and pointed out how much garbage the platforms put me through as a third-party attempting to learn information from them outside of legal processes. I'm probably not going to attempt arbitration in the home jurisdictions of beneficial owners of cryptocurrency firms, but it was worth-while in a US context attempting to hold them responsible at least for proportionate equitable relief (information about platform users who committed fraud using the platforms). It may be just short of US legal standards to hold them accountable in Federal District Court, but ethically I'm still disgusted with it all and made sure to document all that I went through with them.

The crux of it comes down to the fact that the victim I'm helping in this case didn't enter a direct contract with the platforms and thus with their beneficial owners. If that had occurred and a cryptocurrency contract was executed through their website as a result, resulting in it probably being executed through Binance's US DNS infrastructure under its Terms of Use, recent precedent regarding the execution of such contracts through Binance in regards to claims under the Securities Exchange Commission could be made. When a claim involves a non-US platform and the relation to the victim is indirect through the fraud being caused by platform users, there has to be a 'limiting principle' to show personal jurisdiction such that the platform actively caused the fraudulent events in a direct way (caused harm) beyond the fraudulent users merely having used the platform to conduct the fraud. I don't see how that would have been a minimum contact issue if the platforms were domiciled in the United States because then physical jurisdiction under a Federal Statute would apply (applicability of the US as a national forum), but the platforms in this case aren't so even for proportionate equitable relief from them as third parties, direct and active participation in the harm is what apparently counts as a necessary limiting principle.

I ran out of allowances to refine that argument, and appealing an interlocutory order requires both attaining permission from the District Court and the Federal Court of Appeals that takes appeals from that district on a very tight turn-around. Now it makes more sense to argue for attributing the rest of the damages claim to the fraudulent website registrants when discovered (if distinct from the crypto platform user that as identified).

If in a final judgment granting relief (damages) it ends up that not all of the original claim is granted due to a lack of identified Defendants to properly apportion all of it for some reason, such that I can't file Motions for Discovery toward discovering assets to fulfill execution on that specific portion of the claim at all which is stuck attributed to unidentified Does, then I'd appeal the interlocutory decision at that point in regards to the amount that went to Binance because it will have impacted the final damages decision (whether awarded at trial or from the bench via default judgment, depending on if any Defendants answer the summons). It would be the final resort to discovering more Defendants to try recovering the rest of the stolen value after such a trial Court decision.

I think there would be basis to argue that Binance's intentional internal self-sabotage and ignoring of any money control systems that they maintained or claimed to maintain, alongside outright creating control systems that did not actually function. That has been proven in US District Court in the evidence via resulting judgments, and I have referred to that extensively in this case although I hadn't specifically argued for it as evidence of having effectively enabled such fraudsters, and of having drawn out the harm caused to victims by not making any effort to report such fraud for victims' knowledge of where their funds actually went. Any level of investigative activity of fraudulent events and closing of accounts could have discouraged such fraud as well.

Such internal policies were in place during events in controversy in my case, meaning that Binance effectively intentionally enabled any and all global fraudsters using the platform. All fraudsters using Binance from its founding through October 2022 then likely executed most of their trades on Binance’s US DNS infrastructure such that the contracts were executed in the US. Binance even now is still the largest cryptocurrency exchange for crypto as a directly fiat-valued assets so it would have done a lot to prevent fraud or demotivate people to perpetuate gaining cryptocurrency via fraud if there weren't such a convenient way to liquidate it. Most of the value in my case went to Binance.

Restriction to Hague Service Convention for summoning identified direct Defendant – 11/24/2024

Further, mainland China's exclusion of Article 10(a) in particular of the Hague Service Convention was fully upheld as respected by the Court and I understand now how difficult it is to get around that precedent. Discovery requests from first-parties involved in intellectual property disputes (Lanham Act) have the most chance at getting anywhere since it's one of the few US Federal Statutes, if not the only one, with a global scope of personal jurisdiction for discovery (otherwise have to go through the Hague Evidence Convention).

I did learn from attempting to serve alternate process on the currently identified Chinese Defendant that showing personal jurisdiction cannot be used toward an argument for alternate service of process in a US context because the Defendant has to be served in the first place for personal jurisdiction arguments to be considered at all toward judgements against the Defendant (interlocutory or final). US Federal District Courts in that regard regularly have upheld China's exclusions of Article 10(a) of the Service Convention as superseding US interests, so I did go ahead and prepare a Mandarin version of the Complaint, relevant Order approving of Joinder of the Defendant and choice evidence documentation for submittal of service of process through China's Central Authority, which can be submitted online. If there's no Affidavit of Service or actionable feedback within six months, I will argue for default judgment against the identified Defendant under Hague Service Convention Article 15 (foreign Contracting State not timely serving the documents of a validly submitted Application).

Now I need to finish getting a blank copy of a Western District of Washington (home jurisdiction) subpoena for the production of documents to submit to the web host of the fraudulent website which is in another US State which requires generating its own blank domestic subpoena from an originating State's subpoena (Arizona). Then I can serve the domesticated subpoena to the web host directly as granted. This will at least let me discover who ran the website, and those individuals will have to be the ones to which the remaining claim for damages for conversion are applied given that I can't discover any more identities of beneficiary cryptocurrency accounts. That is, assuming the web host coughs up the data, otherwise I'll have to argue for contempt which will only enrich the Court since all precedent I can see shows that civil contempt fees do not monetarily benefit Plaintiffs. Then in the least if different Defendants registered the site compared to the one I've identified already, I will need to submit another Hague Service Request to China if they are also Chinese citizens (probable) after joining them to the case.

First submission to China's Central Authority; arbitration attempt with one cryptocurrency exchange - 12/11/2024

For the one Defendant identified so far for a small amount of the principal (beneficiary of an upstream fraud scheme in the least via an account on CEX.IO), I translated the US Federal District Court Complaint, relevant sections of the Order regarding Joinder and the core evidence into Chinese, and submitted it all to China's Central Authority for the Hague Convention treaties (International Legal and Cooperation Center; ilcc.online). This included re-doing a Hague Model Form draft I had previous prepared using the site's online format, printing the first page and signing as the Applicant. After making some edits that were asked of me, namely making sure to use the Hong Kong SAR's full title in the documents, the packet was passed on to the Supreme People's Court, or so the status of the case says after I provided a receipt for a wire transfer to the Supreme People's Court's bank account that it uses for this purpose (standard processing fee).

However, as the Hague blog (which I cited previously) indicates, this is where the process could get gummed up as far as actual service of process (passing on to the relevant local People's Court and then serving the actual person the summons to a legal case taking place in a non-Chinese jurisdiction). Either Court (the central or the local) could indeed sit on the documents and not comment indefinitely. If that occurs, I already plan to invoke Hague Service Convention Article 15 in such instances (asking the Judge in the US case to make a dispositive judgment about that Defendant if it's been more than six months without indication of service of process of a valid request; a 'certificate' from the relevant contracting authority). The same if the reply given isn't actionable advise, such as what exactly is 'wrong' with the documents to deny service of process in such a way that I can then fix it economically. I also need to finish up discovery from other sources to see if this Defendant is not directly tied to registration of the scam site in itself or is the beneficiary of other cryptocurrency accounts in this situation.

Because I could not achieve personal jurisdiction over beneficial owners of cryptocurrency platforms as third parties, I went for launching an arbitration case, at least one for now directed at Binance. This involves claiming a benefit as a third-party under its Terms of Use and Privacy Policy where it states that it will cooperate with third parties to disclose user data as appropriate in legal processes, which directly contradicts its Terms of Use segments that state it will not provide relief (even equitable relief) to third parties at all.

For that purpose, I also once again I stated how Norwich Pharmacal precedent is relevant given that because the arbitration venue has to be Hong Kong, that such precedent holds as part of applicable law for the arbitration process, besides relevant Hong Kong case law regarding data privacy exceptions and cryptocurrency as a personal virtual asset. This also meant quoting Hong Kong's limitation law to state why bringing up the controversy is within the legal time limits to pursue remedies, and its third-party contracts law to state how Binance did deny giving third-parties any benefits which is seemingly in-line with that law but it doesn't make sense when compared with its own Privacy Policy.

Summoning Binance involved similar essential steps as what I did with the cryptocurrency tracing firm that I determined didn't do all that it promised to me; namely, snail mailing Binance's registered agent (which I had found previously through a Cayman registry search) a Demand for Arbitration (or Application for Arbitration) document summarizing the controversy and a Statement of Claim written like a legal Complaint with relevant law cited (in this situation, also included citations to the Federal District Court case) after filing a case with the arbitration organization (in this situation, Binance's required arbitration organization had to be emailed and paid via PayPal; no immediate access to an e-filing system). Because serving Binance's registerd agent via mail was going to be a slow process, I also sent an email to the registered agent's single publicly available email address on its site, which is typically allowed in modern arbitration rules.

If Binance doesn't respond timely and the arbitration organization that it stipulated to use doesn't conduct desk arbitration (make an ex parte decision without Binance), then it will be similar to the previous arbitration push against this tracing company where I have to then make an Application to enforce arbitration with a relevant Court, and alternatively ask for some other relief (money damages) given that Binance would have failed to voluntarily arbitrate in contradiction to its Terms of Use which I'd call out as an aggravating factor (in this situation, likely to be an Application to the Court of First Instance even though an original lawsuit wouldn't meet the damages claim threshold).

First notes on cryptocurrency exchange arbitration – 12/24/2024

One of the aspects of arbitration in an administrative sense, in emailing back and forth between the other party and the case administrators, is how much needs to be mutually confirmed. The email notice I sent to the registered agent of the counterparty didn't matter because I'm not going to be able to receive read receipts. My updates to the Claim document also had to be explicitly confirmed and acknowledged by the counterparty; sending them isn't enough even though we've both agreed to email-only by now.

The Claim document in any case will be reviewed by the counterparty and we'll see if there's a capitulation or indication of indeed wanting an arbitrator to deal with this explicitly, which means some more up-front fees.

All I can think of is the Seychelles entity being emphasized as the 'only targetable entity' which I saw at first when I voluntarily achieved data disclosure from CEX.IO, except here as a matter of whether the claim is arbitrable at all. However, besides that the venue's laws wouldn't even be consistent with Seychelle's standards (Seychelles doesn't allow pre-trial evidence) which would create a bind of also not making the claim litigable in Seychelles and thus unlimitedly protected against, Binance actually names Hong Kong as the seat of arbitration anyway. Meaning that Hong Kong's laws apply to a dispute. I've been making an argument that's in fact a little bit more elaborate and involved when I could have simply pointed to that. Either way, this venue and jurisdictional seat is mandated so it isn't consistent to demand the benefit of certain claims to go through such a venue yet disallow others, besides that the Seychelles geofencing entity in Binance's Terms of Use likely not having been formed until after events in controversy (never saw it formed until 2023).

I also perhaps could have simply gone to the Cayman Islands to do a duel Norwich and Mareva injunction request, but Norwich in particular is not exactly an 'injunction'. It's discovery so I think that still would have been found to be a point under mandatory arbitration, even for third parties to a contract. A freezing injunction very well could be as well since Hong Kong allows emergency arbitrators to enact temporary injunctions which the Court of First Instance could then enforce. Or for non-emergency injunctions, an arbitral Tribunal can issue a provisional order. That's really the route I would take if and when I achieve data disclosure through this HKIAC (the venue) administered arbitration process, through its Tribunal, as a post-arbitration matter (ex parte as long as the Respondent is informed). Then I'd go to the home jurisdiction of the beneficial ownership entity of the platform (Cayman Islands in this case) to request a freezing injunction against the discovered platform users' platform accounts for any assets that could be held in reserve until they are called to and judged in the US Federal District Court case. This would let me indicate that all matters were arbitrated (head off any notion of a counter-claim in the form of an anti-suit injunction).

On the other hand, because there is essentially no literature that I can find concerning Norwich-style relief as mandatorily arbitrable under a contract that has a mandatory arbitration clause, but rather that it can be used as a Court application to aid in an arbitration proceeding that has an award goal (discovery is not an arbitration 'award' in itself), it should be useable as a Court-requested form of relief without claiming a benefit under a Terms of Use. I chose the arbitration process anyway as an equitable relief matter though, given that Binance in various US Federal District Court cases has pushed for mandatory arbitration over various discovery matters. So I split the difference between treating the data disclosure request as part of traditional discovery as a third-party benefit claimed under a Terms of Use with a mandatory arbitration clause, as well as quoting how it is in-line with Norwich relief while quoting relevant Statutes in the jurisdiction of incorporation and arbitration jurisdiction (anti-money laundering data retention standards and exceptions for allowing disclosure).

In effect, I'm betting that costs to arbitrate could be recovered whereas requesting Norwich relief could instead rather result in the Respondent, who is 'innocently mixed up' in the situation, demanding recompense for having to put resources into finding and providing the information (even though this is a wholly digital documents matter over data that should be stored as a matter of course, I would expect a Respondent to attempt citing generic costs to fulfill discovery which would create a back-and-forth to figure out how those supposed costs break down). The only award I asked for was costs to arbitrate and any other damages as appropriate if Binance cannot or will not provide necessary data for the underlying actionable cause (US Federal District Court case), and that may result in achieving alternate relief more flexibly in such a scenario than what a Court system could provide. I'm not sure if either the home jurisdiction or the arbitration jurisdictions' Court procedure standards allow for providing damages to a Plaintiff/Petitioner when necessary data that the Respondent should have held is not able to be produced; the sanctions seem to involve ordering more discovery or more specific discovery (not going to help or work in those circumstances) or rendering default judgment, but the latter refers to judgment against direct Defendants who fail to participate in discovery.

I went down the path of arbitration originally (claim of a third-party benefit for equitable remedies or damages if they cannot be provided) out of the concern of whether Binance even has data at all due to US Federal investigations uncovering how Binance did not maintain an anti-money laundering regime; rather created a façade of one (not storing user identities; not banning fraudulent actors when found out as such; not preventing actors from sanctioned countries obtaining an account; preventing users in countries where Binance was unregulated from making an account but rather secretly promoting such account intakes). Binance could claim third-parties cannot claim the benefit of equitable remedies (identities of fraudulent users) over users who contracted under the Terms of Use, as the Terms imply, but there is room to argue in that sense that Binance was not an 'innocent third party' and thus claiming a benefit under the Terms if Use is an appropriate contractual action anyway in the balance of interests. That still leaves the option of demanding Norwich relief in support of arbitration through the home jurisdiction of the beneficial ownership entity where that such legal standard does assume the Respondent for information is an 'innocent third party', but if Binance still doesn't provide data in that context then that would reveal how fraud occurred without even the deterrence of capturing and retaining the users' identities in this particular circumstance. The events in controversy did overlap with Binance's lack of an anti-money laundering regime through October 2022. That's where I now see it as having been most useful to first launch the demand for information disclosure as an arbitration case without using the Norwich legal standard in Court; rather arguing that the same discovery (when supported in the evidence) arises in a contractual context due to background evidence concerning Binance's operations. The legal relief that can be imposed via the Norwich standard to me doesn't appear to have the ability to impose damages upon failure of information provision due to third-party innocence being an inherent property of the standard.

With that, I have in a round-about way started to come back to Commonwealth-style injunctive relief and finally got into requesting Norwich relief in practice. Maybe I am being overly cautious of the specter of enforced arbitration, but because temporary injunctive relief (or at least an arbitral acknowledgment of it being worth-while for a Court to issue and enforce one later) and equitable remedies are possible via arbitration, I didn't see an excuse to try and achieve equitable remedy in discovery or injunctive relief through direct Court filings as the first option (again, risk of anti-suit injunctions by the third-parties mixed up in the originating US Court case, even if meritless). However, probably for the OKX platform, I'll make a straight application for Norwich relief and argue that the legal standard lies outside of or supersedes any Terms of Service clauses requiring arbitration and thus that a third-party benefit against a user contract is not being claimed as such from the platform's beneficial owner.

In particular regarding freezing injunctions for any assets that may still be on platforms (what I'll push for as proprietary injunctions because of only targeting assets on the platforms where stolen cryptocurrency was known to have gone, rather than a general freeze against ANY of Defendants' assets worldwide), it isn't an emergency but I can see how Defendants would scramble to remove such assets after being summoned to the US case, which is part of the 'why it's necessary' argument. I'd rather not face a potentially complicated and wide-reaching asset discovery phase as part of executing any potential judgments

The Court of First Instance's e-Court system requires already having a matter that you are already involved in, planning to file immediately or planning to file soon to register Pro Se.

I had already made an account on the Grand Court Cayman Island's e-filing system before when I was considering a direct case before understanding arbitration and all my other options, and I know that one requires essentially paying by mail if you are Pro Se.

TThe UK's on-shore system (HM Courts and Tribunals e-filing) is also straightforward in terms of making a filing, but I haven't completed a draft yet and thus don't know how its pay system works.

Arbitration with Binance which turned out to be more like mutually assertive mediation - 1/24/2025

I suppose it should have been expected that an entity that's unresponsive to me has something to hide as usual, and thus will fight when cornered. That's essentially what occurred in back-and-forth communication with Binance where they finally created a Letter response to my arbitration Claim document, but didn't engage with any aggravating factors, balance of interests or contradictory elements of the Binance.com Terms that I outlined, and its current corporate governance structure (more off-shore personhood extensions since it pled guilty to action commenced by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission). Binance Legal only outlined the same points I had already pre-emptively addressed on that basis in terms of the validity of claiming a third-party benefit from the user contract in the form of discovery and conditional damages if discovery couldn't be given.

I don't blame Binance Legal for clinging to such basic arguments regarding jurisdiction because they're likely being told to do so, but I'm surprised the US Federal Monitor (McKinsey, last I knew) is allowing them to treat victims like this. All of this would be intolerable for victims who lost significant or total savings.

However, additionally, the Binance Terms' mandatory arbitration organization, Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, stipulated that it wouldn't even decide jurisdiction (competency to look at the situation and assign an arbitrator) unless both sides contributed equally to a ~20k HKD admin fee (in line with the conditional damages claim value I put down), but also a $200k HKD arbitrator's fee deposit. That is more in-line with cases involving claims of $4m HKD (~500k USD) by their own fee schedule's standards; not what I expected for a case that is capped at $50,000 USD in conditional damages (Small Claims by its standards). That in itself is suspicious as a business practice to me, where even though unused money may be 'refunded' as it said, this doesn't make any reasonable sense. Of course, Binance Legal tried to pounce on my resulting request to suspend arbitration pending a Grand Court Cayman Islands decision but HKIAC has only agreed to suspend, which does make sense from a neutrality point of view (any Party can restart it later).

This is an intense wake-up to how expensive arbitration has become, and how opaque the pricing is even when there's a presumable fee schedule. It is completely unreasonable from a consumer arbitration viewpoint whatsoever, but HKIAC doesn't make such distinctions, unlike the fee schedules of US arbitration organizations (AAA-ICDR and JAMS for cases qualifying as a consumer vs. corporation dispute). Binance Legal also wanted to receive a decision on jurisdiction, and I agreed because it's such an important topic for cryptocurrency theft victims where assets have been traced to custodial exchanges, but HKIAC didn't want to touch it without these extreme deposits even at that level. It wouldn't say if any more Court decisions would influence changing the deposit.

This seems then like some level of a waste of money regarding HKIAC's up-front arbitration registration fee, but it at least drug out Binance from their entrenched position of continuous, total non-response to any attempts at communication. And I will continue with legal relief that lies outside of the contract (request for a Norwich injunction) on the logic I've kept refining that Binance Holdings Limited is still the original ownership and trademark entity, albeit that it's always been an off-shore (not a domestic Cayman Islands company with corporate officers entirely in other jurisdictions), but no entities associated with Binance are seemingly on-shore. Its Seychelles geofencing entity, which came about after events in controversy (not on the Terms of Use in 2022) and after Binance lost its case with the CFTC, doesn't have any significance in terms of ownership or other practical operational concerns such as data storage, even though Binance claims it is the current Binance.com 'controller' in the Terms of Use and manages all other geofencing entities dubbed 'Binance Affiliates' (such as the ones in the EU created after events in controversy). Seychelles' laws contradict the Cayman Islands on Hague Evidence Article 23 (full exclusion versus qualified exclusion), to say the least, so it wouldn't be a consistent corporate governance structure if Binance could continue to maintain an original ownership entity and the legal benefits of utilizing it while selectively claiming other topics have to be handled by some other off-shore personhood extension. That would afford unlimited protection on such topics and allow a change of jurisdiction to some other shell entity whenever it wanted. This is in essence the same argument as judicially estopping claims that are subject to mandatory arbitration (claims overlapping with a user's contract such that a mandatory arbitration clause is triggered to claim a benefit under that contract, or else a litigant could selectively side-step around it).

I can't see how creating selective legal moats in such a way (various additional off-shore personhoods handled by registered agents) without their being attached to any significant basis in actual practical operational matters where responsibility cannot otherwise be attributed to the current principal place of business or de facto such entity, or the continuously extant founding entity, can possibly hold up in any Court of a given principal place of business by any estimation. However, getting a case started in Cayman Islands in particular has its own challenges. Litigants in person domiciled outside the jurisdiction need a 'jurisdiction address' so I'm registering a virtual mailbox, at least temporarily, for that purpose. The cause of action (Writ) will be a claim on Binance.com custodial assets as the jurisdictional validity (Binance Holdings Limited as the beneficial owner of the platform), even though the immediate ex parte application for a motion to be filed afterward needs to be targeted at Binance as a third party (assuming it is innocently mixed up in the situation in this legal standard sense which doesn't overlap with claiming a third-party benefit from the user contract). Every originating summons filing and application for a motion is separately charged a filing fee, and I've not been able to reach any agreement with the Court to be able to pay by any other means besides international wire due to not having a Cayman bank account (feedback from first attempt when I was contemplating such action before I even had a US Federal District Court case going but didn't completely understand the jurisdictional significance of an 'in rem' claim, and this current attempt).

Otherwise, as far as the OKX platform, using similar logic and citations in case law to show why the Hong Kong SAR should be able to compel relief from the beneficial owner for specifically defined pre-trial evidence, I finally applied for W.D. Wash. to execute such a Letter of Request. I finally figured that the citations in law to justify why the Court can issue such Letters lies in a fundamental reading of the Hague Evidence Convention Articles themselves. In a US context, I saw no way to describe it other than as an 'Applicaton' to execute a Letter of Request as opposed to a Motion, and otherwise provided a draft copy of the Letter like I have before, but also put together a consolidated evidence packet as a supplement (repeat of the Complaint, decisions in the case related to the validity of third-party discovery, and the relevant technical evidence).

I did apply for a Hong Kong judicial account beforehand, but it requires having a 'personal representative' run identification and a signed waiver allowing the representative to do so in order to activate accounts for non-residents, and I don't have a claim against OKX assets that can meet the District Court's threshold ($75,000 HKD). All that I read about the Hong Kong Small Claims Tribunal is that it's informal and requires identified Defendants already as well.

One Defendant finally served process; Letter of Request Applications; finally serving process upon the proxy service provider of the original fraudulent website - 2/7/2025

It turned out that the one Defendant identified so far was served process in mainland China within two weeks. I'm impressed and surprised based on Hague Evidence Request outcomes to China in US Federal District Court cases, but this was only a summons. The person even responded late in January by filing for electronic service in the case, but still needs to enter a responsive pleading. So that discounts any default judgement regarding that person, and that is only for a small amount of the total that I can currently associate with that person anyway. I want as many Defendants involved in a single dispositive judgment as possible instead of multiple dispositive judgments where I can, though.

That then leaves finding out the identities of other cryptocurrency account beneficiaries, if distinct. Because so many methods have not worked to subpoena exchanges despite achieving some sort of direct response from all of them in some form (finally), I put in Applications with citations to the Hague Evidence Convention itself as to why the originating Court can execute Letters of Request alongside all of my developed logic for why those are relevant entities to target versus other shell companies (consistent originating entities or their successors should be able to disclose user data versus an off-shore personhood extension, or there wouldn't be a limiting principle stopping companies from making shell companies with registered agents in other jurisdictions to make a moat out of specific topics as they wished while retaining the benefits of their founding entity jurisdiction or on-shore jurisdiction for all other topics). If the other jurisdiction doesn't compel a response in six months, then that leaves Hague Service Convention Article 15 for the originating Court's right to then render a judgment (I'd ask for contempt again). If the two remaining entities still refuse after process service, I'll ask for contempt again in that situation as well but it would be worth considering going to Court in their jurisdictions by that point in case personal jurisdiction in the originating Court still wouldn't apply.

Then the other problem was the continual saga of serving process upon the proxy DNS service. I ended up serving process upon the statutory agent in Arizona for its agent office (Arizona proxy service in terms of its principal place of business registration), even though that technically is not the statutory agent's mailing address as listed on Arizona Corporation Commission, but it is a valid address on its most current office agent address list on its website. There's no excuse not to process the mail when it did go to a relevant address of the statutory agent, where that company is listed as the proxy service's statutory agent on its Arizona Corporation Commission page.

This comes after I originally utilized Domains by Proxy's address for subpoenas on its own website which really is associated with GoDaddy's address in the same building complex which they aren't even in anymore; it's still up for lease. So the original mail had bounced back to me. GoDaddy and ICANN originally said I had to move through Domains by Proxy, and yet Domains by Proxy still ultimately references an address ultimately associated with GoDaddy in Tempe which is defunct by now.

As far as how the website registrants relate to the case in terms of damages and costs to apportion to them, assuming all cryptocurrency account beneficiaries are identified and where the latter are all distinct from the former, all I can currently think of is to apportion fifty percent responsibility. In that scenario, the only conclusion would be that the website registrants took a cut of the proceeds. This whole situation was also exacerbated by Telegram messages giving 'trade advice' to the victim which I couldn't associate with the fraudulent website, and they probably received a cut but I can't apportion damages to them unless Defendants that respond to this case give up more identities that prove to be accurate as part of a tentative plea agreement.

Because the case has finally reached this point, I have been continually refining a default judgment/motion for discovery for post-judgment execution/plea agreement draft (depending on how the case goes in regards to various Defendants, and their responses or lack thereof). This would be to ask for broad asset discovery in the event of a judgment or default judgment, the verbiage of which I can change later, a restatement of the base damages I asked for plus other costs that have accrued so far, and reasonable interest accumulation. In terms of asset discovery, there is precedent to ask the US counterparties of foreign banks to search their records but it may come down to Hague Evidence Requests otherwise because such US counterparties are known to cite that as a reason to refuse giving data from another region's bank branch. However, balance of interests and international comity test factors have featured in such post-judgment execution requests regarding non-US assets, including US Federal District Courts examining the disclosure laws of other regions as part of such tests.

Significant revision of Complaint based on emergent facts on roles of Defendants - 3/13/2025

The one summoned Defendant made the point in a counter-claim that because he had no knowledge of the fraud, he should be dismissed. I was then ordered to modify the Complaint to address this given Federal standards specifying that specific knowledge of fraud must be alleged over fraud claims, and specifically defined by each Defendants' level of knowledge and role. He alleged he merely bought the cryptocurrency from another unrelated person, even though it was 'over the counter' (wallet to wallet; pseudonymous) and then gave a screenshot of apparently making an in-parallel bank transfer to that apparent immediately-preceding person, which is where partial apparent identification of that person comes from.

Because this is an end-point recipient, as part of preparing this amended Complaint, I first went about making a clear distinction with the registrars of the fraudulent website (the direct inducers of fraud) where they have responsibility over the website which induced the victim's decisions, and thus that they bear the intention of having executed a fraudulently manipulative commodity futures contract with deceptive devices involved (the internally compromised ETH wallet issued to the victim). Because the racketeering act indeed allows all sorts of civil remedy claims by persons and businesses impacted, I did include access device fraud and illicit money transmitter business logic again. This also included money laundering of financial proceeds, or at least the website having started the process by taking cryptocurrency from the compromised ETH wallet to another off-exchange wallet (again, responsibility of the registrants for these initial laundering events).

The next was what to do with the general and total logic around intermediary 'over the counter' wallet users (both currently unidentified and identified) who passed the cryptocurrency down each respective transaction chain, including hot swap interactions with Tokenlon (not via a web-mediated hosted wallet; all intermediary transactions in the evidence were strictly wallet-to-wallet). I still made a 'likely knew of the fraud nexus, even if not directly involved in operations' claim under the Commodity Exchange Act regarding all such Defendants because of the tight timing and coordination of transactions then suggesting direct relationships between all of them (information and belief of direct relationships given that each transaction chain started and concluded in about a week, with the final two transactions in each chain taking place within one to two hours of each other; one even within six minutes).

The most convincing alternate argument I am making after that, though, will probably be the racketeering claim in that context (knowingly benefitting from laundered financial proceeds even without knowing the source) because that allows reducing the argument down to a compact minimum knowledge test. The intermediaries and final recipients had no real reason to attain cryptocurrency via wallet-to-wallet pseudonymous sources unless they knew those people or knowingly took the risk of attaining laundered cryptocurrency given the nature of such transactions when they involve fiat-valued cryptocurrency, given that there are web-mediated exchange methods that have defined the market, mechanisms which imbued cryptocurrency with well-regulated understandings of fiat-valued market prices to begin with. Even if each intermediary and end-point beneficiary had no knowledge of upstream transactions at all, this is the only possible motive or that they otherwise knowingly took on these risks.

Especially because of the data I now have suggesting the registrar of the website fraud nexus was a Chinese citizen, that Tokenlon is clearly dominated by Chinese speakers by simply looking at its forum posts and dual-language setup, that the one identified recipient at a web-mediated exchanged identified so far is a Chinese citizen and that the immediately-preceding transactor he seemingly partially identified is likely a Chinese citizen, and given that mainland China outlawed cryptocurrency trading in 2021, this all establishes additional, specific motives to knowingly attain laundered cryptocurrency in this way even by a minimum knowledge threshold.

The next problem as part of making these amendments is not having enough plausibly consistent and accurate data from the DNS proxy service. The data clearly wasn't verified in my estimation because the reported customer name is pseudonymous and the area code in mainland China doesn't match the purported city. The address is a potential match for that city, but I can't match the apparent room number and building designator anywhere. The particular building name appears in multiple cities in southern China as well, but even though it was all in Pinyin I do find that to plausibly be the building name due to getting so many hits.

I did give the registrar a chance to provide data of plausible accuracy to be useable for joinder and a summons by physical address, but it's been a few weeks. I had to start crafting logic in the Complaint for joining it as a Defendant for then having responsibility for the damage caused by the web registrant customers if they can't reasonably identify them.

In that regard, I am taking two arguments; first under the Commodity Exchange Act for enabling the fraudulent website scheme’s commodity futures contract, even if they had no specific knowledge of fraud on their DNS network, because they would have knowingly taken the risk of this happening and without any means of correcting it by not verifying those customers (recklessly allowing the fraud to occur without deterrent, though indirectly). Secondly, that because the fraud nexus was in essence an illicit money transmitter business hosted on the DNS network, the DNS provider should be treated to the same customer retention standards as defined in the Bank Secrecy Act (also pursuable by persons and businesses as a civil remedy over indictable claims in the Act), which overlaps with data that I was allowed to pursue. However, if the data is not plausibly consistent and accurate for use to join identified Defendants and to eventually summon them, it's not useable. The only other entity responsible is then the DNS provider that knowingly took on the risk that identity-obfuscated persons (proxy service-utilizing persons) whose full identities were not attained and retained might commit fraud in a way that isn't correctable.

I don't see the DNS provider actually having any more data or more accurate data in any way but I will wait and make the final conclusion into a Motion for Joinder as necessary to complete that particular contemplation. For now I'm still allowing time for a response after sending the emailed feedback in late-February (keeping to a 30 days standard or longer for response).

Next steps regarding unresponsive third-party corporate entities - 4/22/2025

The revised Complaint seems to be judicially effective as far as how it applies immediately to the one identified, joined and summoned Defendant.

Now there is the matter of the DNS and web hosting entities of the direct fraudsters not responding to the subpoenas with full plausibly accurate identifications after I gave them a chance to make corrections. Because of 'safe harbor' regulations, my primary argument is responsibility for not demonstrating knowing their customers to begin with to deter fraud and to make it possible to pursue those who do successfully commit fraud; not necessarily direct responsibility for the website actions themselves. In that regard, Know Your Customer regulations in the USA largely apply to financial institutions and money transmitters. Even though a mere network provider to a money transmitter business isn't normally considered to be one in itself, my argument is that the 'something more' is the lack of data verification about the customers which took place either by negligence or by mistake without any apparent robust checks, especially when they should know the identities from payer information anyway (a bank or credit card payment). They had motive to have negligent or lapse-prone processes as well because this fraud in particular and various types of website frauds have been known at least since events in controversy, meaning lots of potential fraudsters seeking DNS and web hosting services at scale, regardless if the service providers knew in advance of any specific fraudulent intent. The harm at this point is the inability to seek and join website registrants accused of fraud exactly because of this failure to understand them, representing a risk that the web entities took because they had full control over whether to accept customers or not who didn't have any apparent fully plausible identities. US Federal District Courts have jurisdiction to restrain violations under the Racketeering Act, which has a right of private action clause and the Bank Secrecy Act is within scope where these Know Your Customer laws are defined.

I have not pursued this yet, but if cross-judicial Letters of Request do go out to unresponsive third-party cryptocurrency exchanges' beneficial owners' jurisdictions, and where the jurisdictions compel responses but the beneficial owners still don't reply, I'd find that they broke anti-money laundering and data disclosure laws at that point in those jurisdictions. That means I'd then argue they should take direct responsibility for the end-point money launderers' actions, whether they knew they would commit laundering acts or not, given the failure to understand them as money transmitter businesses under those jurisdictions' relevant laws for money transmitter businesses. This is where jurisdiction over non-US persons (entities) would be relevant under the USA's anti-money laundering laws because it has a relevant clause for such jurisdiction over funds that have US origin, where I argued that cryptocurrency meets the definition of 'funds' in these types of contexts already due to its ability to act as a money substitute over an electronic network. This holds even without knowing the form of originating illicit activities, which makes sense for the law to include given the basis of money laundering in striving to obfuscate origins of fiat value or money substitutes. Finally, that law includes a scope of violations of non-US law which is why I see potential in joining these entities and finally gaining US personal jurisdiction over them ultimately via Letters of Request if they don't adequately respond to their own jurisdictions as part of that process. Such customer activities would not have been published information and the relevant cryptocurrency exchange websites are not mere network providers; they are money transmitter businesses operating on Amazon Web Services.

The matter of process service upon the cryptocurrency tracing business involved in side matter controversies - 4/27/2025

After reviewing in more detail from not hearing about any further decisions from the applicable Court system in Texas after filing an Application to enforce arbitration with the second cryptocurrency tracing/consulting firm I used as part of working to resolve this entire fraud situation, including about any possible decisions around making a judicial determination outright because of a lack of response from the business to my voluntary attempt at arbitration, I finally realized that process service may not have taken place. Texas' eFile system is referred to as 'file and serve' but to serve personal service via a relevant law enforcement body or other service that the particular Court system partners with, 'additional services' have to be selected and paid for within the system as part of making a filing. I thought that 'serve' implied that a relevant Precinct's law enforcement body would take action, but it appears that only refers to notification by email (not personal service). I'm checking with the relevant city Precinct now to see how I can pay for and effect process service outside of the eFiling system. Otherwise, I'll add an 'amended filing' event (no additional filing fees) but include the proper 'additional service' of personal service via an officer of the peace.

Extremely irritating, but it was my fault for missing this procedural step. The business I still have a contractual issue with (the second cryptocurrency tracer) has since inactivated its relevant tax ID even though the business address has still been listed on the owning individual's latest version of the related cryptocurrency tracing services website (the website is now periodically offline, however). The address is associated with a business park that handles mail and document scanning for clients to keep clients' private residence and contact information confidential. However, this is a known individual so I imagine officers of the peace do some amount of research to find a current business address or primary owner in the event a previous address is not being used by the target, and basic Internet searches seem to indicate that this is a standard protocol. I don't see an issue with process service EVENTUALLY occurring, even if the business park cannot or refuses to forward a summons to a former client, if the business owner indeed isn't using the business park anymore.

As I said in the Court Application filing itself, this is important to me in relation to wider social concerns, even as a 'side matter' as I call it, because cryptocurrency consulting businesses that both indicate that they can confirm where cryptocurrency that was lost due to fraud was taken and that they can contact law enforcement on behalf of a victim are doing a disservice if they cannot in practice accomplish the latter or even prove that they attempted the latter. The FBI has an exceedingly low case acceptance rate compared to the scale of reported Internet fraud in the US, let alone the potential scale of unreported cases, and has only solved about ~70% of the cases that it did take in 2022 and 2023 where about a third of all cases involved cryptocurrency. I didn't know any ofthat before seeking to utilize a second cryptocurrency tracer, but it still makes sense that someone professing to have law enforcement contacts should be able to utilize them to move a situation closer toward recovery, or to provably exhaustively rule out that possibility, if utilizing such contacts is part of the contract. If I failed to report results from coordinating with suppliers and shipping companies in my job, I would have been fired.

Because my contract with the particular tracing/consulting business with whom I take issue had nothing to do with achieving specific results from law enforcement coordination work, I'm not even claiming anything more than that the related tasks were not provably attempted (some sort of date-stamped activity summary documents or redacted communication files have never been sent to me). The only damages I claim are for a refund related to those types of tasks and no further, besides Court costs and any arbitration costs.

These exact tasks and even having a specifically defined law enforcement officer receive the case files were discussed in the Meeting of the Minds (email exchanges) and the formal contract itself. Proof of such tasks being attempted (liaising with law enforcement contacts that the business supposedly had and with Coinbase) is all I expected based on the email exchanges which were not contradicted in later emails or in the formal contract, and yet I didn't receive a response within six months (three to six months quoted for an initial law enforcement result in the emails, revised to six months flat in a Zoom call). In practice, I didn't receive a response until nine months later via an email unrelated to the owner's original website and also unattached to his current website's domain, which merely claimed that law enforcement had been contacted to no effect (supposedly too low of a value for their consideration). I had to contact the private investigator who recommended the business to me in the first place to even receive that much of a response. This is what spurred me to consider arbitration per the terms of the contract (I chose AAA-ICDR because the contract didn't specify a particular organization to use), but AAA-ICDR refused because the business didn't voluntarily respond and I had no Court order for arbitration.

What's funny is that in spite of obviously having received mail notification (I sent certified mail) regarding a demand for arbitration and receiving emails via his latest website's public email address from a mediator on a mediation contact attempt I had tried beforehand (the mediator never reported the emails as bouncing), and that he assuredly also received emails from Texas 'file and serve' because I had his latest website's generic email contact included where 'serve' in that context minimally should have entailed email notification, the owner still sent me an email (of course from yet a different email address) about a Reddit post I made on a low-trafficked (only a few likes and no comments) post about his business without reference to these other communication attempts. I responded to that email where he had offered a refund but without specifics on how that would be accomplished other than asking to have a teleconference about it, and I haven't heard back. I did express preference for the Court system to figure this out if I couldn't receive any concrete specifics, but the lack of replies to communications is the exact problem I've had throughout this entire sub-controversy to begin with. I've in essence dropped any pretense of being polite or understanding about it and simply bluntly want responses toward correcting the situation.

All of this originally resulted in delaying my consideration of taking legal action regarding the cryptocurrency fraud in the first place because I wanted to conclusively rule out law enforcement assistance as a possibility. I was willing to wait the contract duration (six months) for an answer from the business I hired to do exactly that because the owner did quote six months for any results, but the first warning sign should have been when I didn't receive a status update after I first emailed for one after four months.

I realize he may want to prevent getting hacked by other actors because of the general line of work he's involved in, but to me this is an entire case study in how not to run a customer relations regime within such a type of investigation and consulting business, regardless of later excuses I received about his claiming to not be someone who initiates contact with law enforcement. Initiating contact with law enforcement, which was very much explicitly defined in the original emails, then shouldn't have been on clear offer as part of contract consideration. As I said in the Court Application and original arbitration Complaint document, I wouldn't have accepted the services at all without such offers. I already had done my own amateur trace work and then had Cybertrace formalize it originally, even though I was not exactly happy with Cybertrace dodging my initial question of what I could do with trace verification in actual practice if I commissioned them, and because they derided my amateur work as 'not trace work' despite their finished results ending up completely overlapping with mine. However, I was fine with originally having a company I could trust to verify the data based on reviews and its established presence in the cybersecurity industry for potential Court or law enforcement purposes, even though I'm still incredulous even in that situation about their supposed lack of further ability to contact law enforcement on someone's behalf (beyond providing clients with a 'LEO' template for self-submission) when they assuredly work with Australian law enforcement bodies in the least.

Denial of joinder of DNS network entity under current logic; next planned action - 5/21/2025

Because precedent exists that lack of accurate discovery being provided (or even lack of any provision of discoverable material) is in itself not grounds for a showing that harm occurred, even though I made an assertion under the Bank Secrecy Act's Know Your Customer standards with a 'something more' argument (not only a mere provider for money transmitting businesses but that there were probable systemic lapses in accurate knowledge about customers, where knowing such customers is critical to deterring fraud as well as correcting fraud that did occur), the DNS network host of the website was denied for joinder as a Defendant.

I find that the ethical and business standards argument is fine, but even in a situation involving the accurate identification of pseudonymous Defendant customers of the DNS host, third-parties (the DNS host in this instance) are taken to have protection from responsibility over the customers' actions anyway and without having to analyze a Federal Question asserting that 'safe harbor' provisions are superseded in that circumstance. That's my takeaway given that this is not an ordinary discovery procedure; it is fundamental to the case to identify Defendants, and yet the DNS host was taken to have fundamental protection anyway unless a 'cognizable harm' can be shown in some even more specific sense against the victim, such as the web host itself defrauding the victim directly. That was what I was attempting to show in the sense that harm is ongoing by not understanding the customers, but evidently that is not enough, or the way it was framed and the exact Federal Question posed so far were not relevant enough in that context.

The plausible motive to have lax or recklessly expedited/mistake-prone data standards to take in website registrant customers due to the known constant reproduction of harmful websites was evidently taken as not rising to the level of harm against the victim in itself, yet I bet it would work in a government case regarding harm against US citizens in general (harm against the US and thus against 'the people'). However, then direct victims who indeed cannot individually pursue website registrants for that reason would have to apply for remission from the Federal government over money won from such action on their own. Then it's the same problem of their having to showing how they specifically were harmed by the DNS host and/or web host and why. In that sense, victims showing that some Federal standard or another was not met may not be enough, as in this instance.

That leaves what to do next. The parent web hosting company defines a specific arbitration organization and is all tied up in various ownership and legal processes with the DNS host, the latter of which not having any specific arbitration requirements or Terms of Use on its website, and where the whole controversy comes from the web host denying to aid in a non-public data disclosure inquiry in the first place, saying the subsidiary solely handles DNS matters and where the DNS provider has next to no such reporting mechanisms. Then it would turn into fighting against the 'no benefits to third parties' clause as overbroad as well as other jurisdictional concerns, and it would be a wholly voluntary arbitration attempt again as I already saw with Binance. The DNS host is contracted under ICANN's relevant 'know your registrant' rules but the difficulty is still there getting anywhere as a third-party claimant without the backing of a Court order to mandate arbitration. Otherwise, it's back to researching how to frame it as an individual harm relevant to a Federal Question where information found in discovery apparently isn't enough, or isn't enough in the way I framed it.

5/25/2025 - Ultimately, I went with a primary arbitral basis in claiming a benefit as a third-party under ICANN's Know Your Customer requirements that it has set with its Registrars (clients) in relation to a duty of care under US State precedent (in this situation, Arizona in terms of precedent in common law conceptions for specific duty in facts and circumstances even if prior direct or special relationships did not exist; not merely a concept of 'assumed duty') to attain and retain plausibly accurate customer data, and to disclose it when good cause calls for disclosure. Thus, I find this basis supersedes the contract's blanket denial of benefits to third-parties, including from Registrars ascribed to the contract. Alternatively, I still asserted a plausible Statutory basis from an Arizona public policy duty of care which does require a basis in Statute or a definitive basis for duty of care in the public mind, but it is definitely a secondary argument given the definitional concerns of whether DNS and web hosting entities can be considered to be money transmitters even under specific factual circumstances.

As usual, I'll go to an appropriate Court to compel arbitration as needed so it may turn into a back-and-forth between different forums, but it may be different regarding US corporations (compared to the secondary cryptocurrency tracer situation) that presumably would want to keep good standing with the arbitration organization stipulated under ICANN's contract and in one of the companies' Terms of Service. I.e. Binance promptly answered a call to arbitrate as outlined previously, albeit it turned into more like mutually suspicious mediated discussion until and unless I can get a cross-judicial Letter of Request under the Grand Court Cayman Island's review for any further developments that may serve to lower the intense arbitration deposit fee quotes in that circumstance, or achieve a Statutory duty of care resolution under Norwich Pharmacal precedent one way or another without going to arbitration.

Dealing with duty of care situations in a third-party context has definitely been much less straightforward in a US context, even though I do need cross-judicial Letters of Request issued to pursue the non-US situation further, given how I'd need to make an in rem jurisdictional basis to file directly in the Cayman Islands, as well as in Hong Kong for that matter regarding the other cryptocurrency-related company still in controversy. I researched that possibility to a greater extent for the Cayman Islands as opposed to Hong Kong, but the former situation put me off in having to pay for all Motions by wire, needing an in-jurisdiction mailing address and even having to receive leave simply to ask for an ex parte judicial action, where all filings need to have an affidavit that has been approved by a Clerk of Court as a witness bringing a question up of how that could be accomplished digitally for those not in the jurisdiction (not only via a Deputy Clerk of Court which is the position I interacted with); and where the latter requires finding a person to act as your representative to confirm your ID in person if you aren't in Hong Kong where I can't imagine or accurately find what exact companies might have related services on offer.

A formal decision still hasn't been made regarding issuance and/or transmittal of Letters of Request, unless cross-judicial action is in fact happening in the background, but otherwise I don't see how the US Federal District Court can deny issuing and transmitting such Letters by now because I showed the basis in Statute for why district courts can do so; and it does not involve that Court having to make any enforcement decisions, findings of cognizable harm or findings of duty of care to do that. It's all based on good cause for the release of such data which was already found, but extended to the next level of cross-judicial cooperation which I'm not ideally suited to do given that relevant Central Authorities haven't listened to me, and I shouldn't have to hire a lawyer only for that purpose when I've expounded the relevance and basis in a US context, international treaty context and the target jurisdictions' Statutory context.

5/26/2025 – I was able to reconstruct the address in a further way using the block number as a Roman character literal which I wasn’t doing before, and finally yielded an exact search that plausibly matches what I received from the DNS company. But a land registry search via Hong Kong's system predictably yielded names that don't match the name associated with the primary web domain in controversy that look clearly pseudonymous to me. I can't effectively use that to summon anyone and have it be accurate. Summonses can be effected by certified mail through Hong Kong's allowance via Hague Service Convention Article 10(a), but those former tenants could clearly show that someone else used their address data given the lack of a match in reported pseudonym versus actual tenant names. I would also need to find their current addresses. This was the primary problem I had with a pseudonymous name being reported and now it's fully confirmed from every angle I can think of.

For good measure, I tried to reverse look-up the reported phone number with TrueCaller but it also gives a clearly pseudonymous name that may have changed multiple times anyway if it's a VOIP number or similar that keeps changing users. Hong Kong's 1081 search system seems primarily geared for business and organization look-up as well.

Reconsideration of non-US third-party data situations firmly under a first-party public policy duty of care basis; continued jurisdictional concerns regarding non-US entities - 5/31/2025

Even though the US Federal District Court handling the US case hasn't made a decision about my latest Applications for the issuance and transmittal of Letters of Request, given its rejection of joining the DNS and web hosting companies as Defendants based on Federal precedent regarding cognizable harm, this is finally making me think of duty of care more broadly as a first-party concern rather than a third-party data acquisition issue in more ways. I always thought of the Binance and OKX data disclosure situations as entailing 'duty of care' but didn't think of it from a public policy standpoint (Statute and case precedent basis) as a stand-alone first-party issue even without regard to claiming third-party benefits under user contracts (Norwich precedent for disclosing the identities of those mixed up in causing harm via an otherwise-innocent entity), even though duty of care stands out in British Commonwealth-adjacent law so much more to me than in US standards. Then secondarily, it's about a specifically-defined data retention duty under relevant contract clauses where such data acquisition, retention and appropriate disclosure is presumably to prevent and restrain customers from causing harm to others, where the Statutory basis for data retention lies in anti-money laundering laws' Know Your Customer requirements which extend to money transmitter businesses (the exact type of data at issue in this particular Norwich disclosure controversy). Alleging duty of care under these standards (both in duty to disclose and in attaining and in retaining plausibly accurate data of the type in controversy to begin with) and under specific contractual duties establishes the cause of action.

It's then still up to a jury, Court or arbitrator to decide the facts on breach, causation and appropriate damages in this private enforcement context, where I myself would not be asking for a trial but facts may be otherwise contested or a trial requested leading to a determinations under the facts. The Statutory basis also supersedes needing to utilize an arbitrator (not claims that can be judicially estopped), but I don't see a reason why an arbitrator couldn't undergo making a determination using the facts as an option, and I had gone an attempted arbitral route at first with Binance out of caution.

For that reason, I am revisiting at least undergoing a Court Claim against Binance on the same logic as the DNS and web hosting companies (if the latter don’t respond to US arbitration), except instead of US State case precedent around a duty of care in public policy it is instead, of course, based on Norwich case precedent which is now to the level of an injunctive relief mechanism in various Commonwealth law-adjacent regions, including the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong. That's in contrast to my previous more-complicated thinking of making an in rem claim (jurisdiction based on 'where' the property is; in this situation based on the principal places of businesses (or de facto equivalent) having ultimate responsibility over such cryptocurrency accounts) against unknown users' assets and then asking for an ex parte discovery request, which requires filing leave for making a judicial request before a Motion by affidavit to make such a request can even be done.

The problem is still the many requirements to get a Claim started in the Cayman Islands. That is, having a judicial address (for someone out of the territory, I've found that a virtual mailing address should work; no real reason why it wouldn't that I can see), having to file nearly all documents (including the Claim document) by affidavit (at least most or all of those following the initial Writ of Summons) which means a Clerk of Court or an Officer of the Peace swearing in the materials via signature (cannot be a Deputy Clerk of Court which is the title I've always dealt with in my case filing attempts), having to pay by international wire as someone outside of the territory, and nearly every type of filing having its own fees on top of an ad valorem fee based on the total claim as part of the initial filing fee. I'm at least emailing the same Clerks (I believe they are 'full' Clerks and not Deputies) who I originally emailed about directly processing a Hague Evidence Request where they rejected the request without referencing any reasons I can see that are valid under Hague Evidence Convention Article 12. I at least need to know about having a Clerk of Court virtually swear in documents (how that would work) but we'll see; they never responded to my follow-up about Hague Evidence Convention Article 12.

As far as OKX, the claims are below Hong Kong's District Court threshold so the principal place of business may escape responsibility from that standpoint if a Letter of Request never goes out. Otherwise, I still need to consider that jurisdiction and how to overcome the 'get someone to run my ID documents to the Court physically' requirement if I do finally determine that the web registrants reside (or resided) in Hong Kong, beyond the pseudonymous name data I have in conjunction with a Hong Kong address.

It should not be this difficult to get a Hague Evidence Request issued by a US Court, but this is what being stuck between common law and civil law systems looks like. The US Court may still process my request because silence normally means something is being done or may be done based on the pattern I'm seeing in decisions, where my other rejected Motion for Joinder was processed stand-alone. However, I'm not betting on that even though I showed in Statute how US district courts can issue Writs in support of their jurisdictions as long as they are consistent with the law, and that the Department of State does not preclude tribunals from sending Letters of Request to other jurisdictions. It also wouldn't entail the Court needing to make any decisions itself about enforcement or cognizable harm matters. Still, it seemingly isn't done that much despite being such an important facet for collecting evidence in US civil cases in an increasingly globally digitized economy.

I am also planning a summary judgment request over the one person identified and summoned to this case who is not replying anymore (not default judgment because he was served under the People's Republic of China's mainland standards and he initially answered) regarding the asserted facts in the amended Complaint. However, if judgment is then rendered based on the facts in this case (I didn't ask for a trial and this other person clearly isn't asking for one either due to lack of response over a Meet and Confer Order), then it's about the fact that only US assets at most can be broadly discovered and gone after, if the person has any in the US. I think I do have to concede finding a lawyer in the appropriate region of mainland China in such a situation to domesticate the judgment, where China does have standards for analyzing reciprocity in executing US judgments after a pattern developed in 2017 but because there is no bilateral treaty I cannot submit the judgment through China's Central Authority for the mainland in the same way I did with the Hague Service Request. There are a number of lawyer-finding sites; may be difficult to find one willing to deal with this exact situation but there are a lot of them to consider. However, the problem for those residing outside China is accessing the Court e-filing systems which have all been periodically geo-blocked, and they now have been consistently for a good stretch, besides that a Chinese phone number is normally needed to make accounts. That's still the case for creating accounts on various mainland Chinese government websites that are at least still partially accessible using a US IP address, but they are not Court system websites anyway (what I want to access, ideally).

Getting somewhere with a Cayman Islands Court filing; finally achieving basis to file a request for judgment in the original US Federal District Court case against one person as well as in the case involving the secondary cryptocurrency tracer side-issue - 6/5/2025

Now I finally have gone full circle in seriously filing a case into the Grand Court Cayman Islands based on seeking Norwich relief and conditional damages based on duty of care (public policy basis), even though as usual I have clerical and admin issues to finish getting through.

Of course, I still flailed about with how to assemble a Writ of Summons where the fundamental formatting cannot be changed at all or the Clerk's Office will spot any differences and reject the document, but the Cayman Islands' PDF format leaves little room to add words into fill-in spots. Besides messy PDF editors that break text blocks up in all sorts of uneven ways and don't always have full text block resizing features or even text editing features for text already in a document, there's Adobe Acrobat's 'add text as a comment' feature. It works to create blocks of text with a white background, at least, and I had to add words back in to various such blocks because of the blocks covering various words given how little room there is to add fill-in words between other words, such as the Defendant's name and date of submission.

I was also still thrown off by what constitutes an originating pleading; that is, the document full of the factual and legal argument assertions, because Writ documents have their own small Statement of Claim section where hardly anything can be input. Further, Statements of Claim are listed separately on the fee schedule as opposed to Writ filings (pleading versus originating documents). However, the Writ of Summons template says that a 'full' statement of claim can be included or a brief statement of the nature of the case can be outlined alone, and other sources indicate that a full claim has to be submitted later anyway if not done immediately (rules of the court specify a time limit after service of the brief Writ for a full statement of claim, which then has to be served separately in that situation).

A full statement of claim should be appended to the Writ anyway to prevent any later issues or fee questions, where the document format I use seems to be fine (largely the same as a US Court template) so long as I print the final page and indorse it, then append it (except without the digital unsigned version of the final page to avoid confusion). I guess this could still turn into yet another clerical debacle of formatting issues causing rejection, but the title of the action and other information is on there as required. The Writ and the Acknowledgment have to be indorsed so that requires at least printing out the final pages of those documents, signing them and appending them to the other digital-only pages (or print and scan those entire documents since they are short anyway), then appending the full statement of claim. Lots of document assembly but I don't see another way around it when so much requires a signature. Then there is a 'request for Bailiff to service process - checklist' filing action where I take the 'checklist' to be the documents to be served out of the ones that were previously filed and accepted by the Clerk's Office. This is why I want to make sure Bailiff's fees are covered in the wire payments.

Anyway, that should cover basic document matters but the wording and procedurals around Cayman Islands Court processes have continually thrown me off, prompting me to want to cover them.

I always had a big concern about sending a wire transfer as well because of the nature of such financial actions, and that's why I wanted someone to answer if I had ANY alternatives at all given that I can't get the electronic Court system's payment page to work for my type of account. Then of course, typical of me trying to do solo admin activities without anyone checking my confirmation bias/proofreading my work, I finally moved to send wire in relation to the latest case filing I made (the one I finally decided to go with), and I addressed it to the Grand Court admin's 'Category 1' account for USD instead of the 'Category 2' account for USD after reviewing the payments website again, even though I had already noted the Category 2 account in my notes. The latter is the one meant for Court civil fee payments. I also still have to make a second wire for a little bit extra that the Clerk's Office calculated, even beyond the total I had come up with where I added in Bailiff's service of process fees. However, at least the situation is moving along.

There's also still the matter of who can swear in an affidavit for me via digital means (do an oath and sign an affidavit, including the jurat signing it, via a digital meeting given that I'm not in that jurisdiction) so I can exhibit evidence to such a document for the Court (evidence documents otherwise aren't filed directly). This is the same situation I'd face in Hong Kong Courts. I dont't have to deal with any of that yet but it's an impending problem. Both systems take affidavits utilizing other Courts' seals to be truthful and factual automatically but I don't know how a process server or an 'officer of the peace' equivalent in the United States is going to be able to handle this kind of situation (sign and stamp documents for me, whether or not we go through a formal swearing process) because it isn't a US concept to my knowledge, and a US Clerk of Court definitely isn't going to do that as far as I can see given how little US Courts want to potentially show bias to any particular litigant. It's already seemingly difficult to get US Courts to issue and transmit cross-judicial Letters of Request, probably because of how rare of a request it is and again, there's probably a reluctance not to show bias toward any particular litigants, even though that process has nothing to do directly with enforcement or determination of breach and causation regarding level of harm.

Further, I finally put in a motion for summary judgment into the original US Federal District Court case regarding the one person so far identified in an alleged downstream laundering role, given that he had responded to the case but has not responded any further to contest any other facts after I had amended the Complaint. Then I put in a motion for default judgment for this secondary cryptocurrency tracer debacle in the county Civil Court's handling it given that he didn't respond to that case at all, same as the lack of response to attempting mediation and arbitration.

Continuously dealing with the Cayman Islands Law Courts' admin system - 6/12/2025

As expected, between my mistakes dealing with a system I haven't used before besides cursory prior review and getting deeper into the quirks of it, even settling payment to the Cayman Islands Law Courts' system has taken continuous action. Finally, I called the Payments department (long-distance call despite being within North America's international code), then Court Funds, and then Civil Registry regarding transferring a wire from Category 1 to Category 2. At least Payments independently confirmed the funds had hit, but then Court Funds deferred to Civil Registry regarding an actual transfer, and then Civil Registry only could confirm it was still being worked on; apparently to be emailed once finished and that's seemingly why there's been no email replies. However, at minimum I'm going to have to check in again next week by phone if nothing happens.

Then apparently the ad valorem fee quote I received was indeed only based on principal value, which I still doubt because it perfectly adds up to include interest and cost from my original Writ submission. However, with that confirmation, I'll continue to take the fee quote I have as the official fee and add safety padding to another wire transfer as necessary once this initial transfer is figured out.

Organizationally, then, it's very much a series of silos and reminds me of matters I dealt with in my own supply planning job for finished consumer goods. However, that's simply how it is. I shouldn't have made a wiring mistake but the entire way it's being dealt with and getting anywhere in this system in general has been predictable in terms of complexity compared to the strong hints I received in January 2025, and based on my original realization in 2023 that this Court system doesn't have an online payments scheme for non-residents without a Cayman bank account. Now it's all coming together to have to get it fully figured out.

That's fine with me, ultimately, but the number of actions I'm needing to take overall to get at the largest amount of stolen value would not be tolerable for anyone who lost their entire savings to fraud and money laundering. However, this is all the more reason as to why I'm willing to pursue all related controversies to the greatest extent I can in relevant jurisdictions, both against fully plausibly accurately discovered tort harmers and against entities that I find have failed in a duty of care by their apparent inability to identify their customers in such a manner.

6/20/2025 - The Writ, Acknowledgement and full Statement of Claim packet that I submitted on June 13th (each indorsed, requiring scanning in and appending wet signature pages) has been stuck at 'Acknowledged' status but I've taken that as an incredibly positive sign given that it wasn't instant-rejected in the e-filing system, knowing that this Court system is responsive when it comes to filings. However, I have no idea what is holding it up any further now besides the location of the wire transfers, which should have been non-trivial to rectify.

Because of the quirks of this entire admin system, I may submit a filing to request service of process of the Writ anyway and see what Judicial Admin says or if it gets instant-rejected. So much only seems to be communicated via formal filings as if the administrative filing process itself were a legal process requiring judgment on a filing-by-filing basis. It has never been straightforward to receive answers by phone or email before submitting a filing on purely admin questions.

In the least, though, I have to assume one of my standing unanswered questions concerning if a Writ and a full Statement of Claim would be assessed separate filing fees if filed together has been essentially answered by now given such a document hasn't been outright rejected. The Cayman Islands Law Courts' fee schedule lists Writs and Pleadings as separate fee assessments, yet the Writ document says that a full Statement of Claim can be included. However, it appears filing a consolidated such document is only assessed one filing fee, or else I'm sure my current filing would have been quickly outright rejected for not having enough fees posted.

Initial response of web hosting and DNS service companies to arbitration demand - 7/10/2025

Predictably, similarly to Binance, the relevant web hosting and DNS service companies (which I argue are related) decided to object to the arbitrability of any claims around user data disclosure due to the contract with ICANN 'not entailing benefits to third parties' without explicitly addressing any of the reasons I laid out as to why this is irrelevant as an absolute decree when third parties are alleged as having been harmed by service users. I.e., I already had anticipated these arguments in-depth and all I received were some paragraphs in objection, not unlike Binance's response to similar in-depth arguments. In essence, they repeated the decree in itself as if it is iron-clad and not subject to extenuating circumstances just because they said so, or just because ICANN said so, even though the point of Know Your Customer contractual clauses in this context is presumably to prevent and restrain harm by web service users against third parties.

They also argued that the AAA-ICDR's Consumer Rules should not apply for that reason (if any of AAA-ICDR's Rules could apply at all versus administrative closure of the case) such that at most, the International Rules would supposedly need to apply, even though this is a matter where the Parties and subject matter do not span multiple countries (unlike the AAA-ICDR's definition of an international controversy). The International Ruleset requires payment of all fees by the filer, whereas the Consumer Rules are meant to allow access for individuals to arbitrate with businesses in a cost-effective manner for same-country matters (consumer only responsible for part of the filing fee).

I still don't blame corporate lawyers for taking this type of stance in service of their executive and ownership groups because this short-term strategy of denial, deflection and delay ultimately comes from the corporate structure. However, it really puts into question the purpose of arbitration if it can be derailed so easily for these significant harms that are known to occur where getting at the direct perpetrators does require cooperation by service providers to identify individuals in their specifically defined roles in causing harm (e.g. fraud and laundering by website users, let alone by account holders at financial institutions which is why Know Your Customer Statutes tend to focus on financial institutions).

In any event, I have an alternate public policy duty of care argument anyway which features in the arbitration Claim document and thus will feature in a legal filing if I have to do so. That argument also hasn't been engaged with so far, again in the same manner as Binance pointedly not engaging with any Norwich Pharmacal duty of care arguments. Further, all of this at most is a delay tactic and as usual, I note all of these refusals to substantively cooperate within my legal document drafts as part of preparing for any further action I need to take. In the medium to long-term, for situations where someone like me does actually get through the filter of untenably over-broad and vaguely threatening contractual language to bring a case in some sort of jurisdiction whose cause of action ends up holding, to me I can't see how delay tactics ultimately serve those corporations' ownership groups. To me, it only ends up revealing their practices and makes them appear uncooperative in taking any sort of full and complete accountability.

I don't have any such duty of care claims finalized in a Court case setting to have a benchmark for how proceeding to Arizona legal action might commence in this situation. However, the Binance legal filing situation's administrative controversies are nearing completion to get that case started. The final issue still revolves around ad valorem fees where a substantially higher fee quote was calculated even though my June 13th Writ filing hardly changed the total claim from June 4th (only added the June 4th fee quotes in themselves as claimed costs), so as usual I still need to pry answers out of Cayman's Civil Registry.

I would define it as baseline unethical to deny fully aiding an impacted third-party consumer in all possible ways to identify a customer accused of harms via an offered service, even though it's clear why corporation don't want to do so, particularly in the web hosting and cryptocurrency industries where the latter only recently came under the purview of anti-money laundering laws with Know Your Customer provisions and the former still don't fit neatly into such Statutory standards. I.e. they clearly want to prevent or minimize having to pay for a robust anti-fraud system and want to minimize demonstrating any degree of liability.

However, especially regarding a persistent questioner of absolute contractual decrees denying any sort of substantive assistance to third parties, I find corporations would benefit long-term given that all initial deterrents clearly have failed by the point of dealing with a serious pursuer. I don't see any ultimate defensibility for an absolute 'no third party benefits' decree in terms of a corporation's ability to shut down a duty of care cause of action entirely in all possible contexts when it's clearly an overbroad policy given the capacity of website service users to harm consumers, even if only the subset of self-similar websites I found in relation to websites in controversy are taken to be the only sample size. Even so, it's clear such corporations allow their lawyers to keep fighting anyway because they must believe they have a chance at preventing more precedent from forming in relation to duty of care towards third parties in these contexts.

With all of that, I imagine just like what the HKIAC did, that the AAA-ICDR will require more fees and alternate review processes if arbitrability in itself needs to be determined due to its being in dispute. I obviously can't agree to that as an ethical fee practice for individual vs. business situations in terms of allowing for an accessible method of correcting social harms. However, again, if it has to be transferred to a relevant Court system for that reason, I have the alternative duty of care argument (centered on Arizona precedent where the corporations' principal places of business are via statutory agent). I already noted what I characterize as a lack of willingness to cooperate on the substantive issues at hand as part of preparing the legal document version of the Claim (largely similar). I still find that a cause of action exists based on disclosure of plausibly accurate customer data for good cause, and where I find that a public policy duty of care basis exists besides the contractual basis. I.e., that even discounting plausibly relevant Statutes, that a firm understanding in the public mind of Know Your Customer standards exists, which applies to web host and DNS service companies because it's generally known that websites with fraudulent intent appear on their networks, and where it would be expected for companies operating in that industry to keep informed of the latest fraud and laundering trends. Thus, that a basis exists for the eventual factual determination of breach, causation and damages; whether via adjudication, trial or arbitration if plausibly accurate data provision still doesn't take place. I'm still not personally asking for a trial in any legal situations, but respective Defendants could ask for trials.

Duty of care from a USA perspective in detail - 8/2/2025

As expected, the DNS and web hosting companies in Arizona contested to the use of AAA-ICDR's Consumer Rules as well as to the making of a claim as a third-party, even though I made a balance of interests argument against an absolute 'no third-party benefits' clause in ICANN's contract and in the web host's contract (that the web host forbids fraud by its customers against third-parties, so it would be a contradiction not to allow an impacted third-party consumer to claim contractual benefits; namely, the customers' non-privileged personally identifiable information as they are supposed to keep per ICANN's standards). The International Rules are defined in ICANN's contract but I argued that in specific is an over-broad stipulation as well because the AAA-ICDR only defines an international dispute as one where either the subject matter or the Parties span multiple regions/countries. Of course, the companies wanted to push for the international rules in the least if arbitration were to proceed at all because it involves more up-front fees for a filer (companies have to pay a share of fees up-front in a Consumer Rules situation).

This discussion occurred even before assignment of a case administrator, and close to the deadline of when the companies were supposed to initially respond (argument ended up spilling past the deadline). AAA-ICDR, unlike the HKIAC, initially found in favor to proceed under the Consumer Rules whereas the HKIAC wanted that process to entirely be part of jurisdictional analysis by an arbitrator in the first place, and where that wouldn't even occur without massive 'deposit' fees as I described before, without apparent consideration for its actual fee schedule compared to the Claim I was making. I already trust AAA-ICDR more as an institution for that reason, even though it also said that an assigned arbitrator could further review those issues.

The companies then simply stated it was all a 'frivolous' claim without citing any substantive issues I brought up in the Claim document, and threatened to seek their filing fees if arbitration proceeded. AAA-ICDR had stated that just like in the secondary cryptocurrency tracer situation I went through (which still isn't fully resolved in itself because I'm waiting on a Court decision there), that a non-mutual response may result in administrative closure, even though its Consumer Rules state that it can proceed with ex parte desk arbitration over one Party's non-respones.

I would have been fine if the companies didn't want to cooperate any further and either let ex parte desk arbitration happen or bring it to Maricopa County Superior Court. But, surprisingly, the companies contracted a third-party law firm and paid the filing fees, it seems. So it's in the process of a case administrator being assigned. Really seems overkill to need an outside law firm, but that's what finally occurred. Ok, fine.

This then turns to duty of care in a USA context. Arbitration is a recognized legal process to keep Court dockets lighter (Arizona, like other States I've reviewed, has processes to apply for the compulsion of arbitration), so I still saw this aspect of the case (duty of care as a legal concept) extremely important to bolster further.

The Restatement (Third) of Torts from the American Law Institute, which Courts can use as a guideline in their decisions, in its commentary essentially sees the validity in civil cases at a State Court level of bringing up 'negligence per se' claims in the context of a violation of Federal Statutes as constituting a valid claim of negligence in itself. Some commentators may disagree with this in the legal community as I've read, however. Primarily, that despite this procedure meeting a concept of 'institutional comity' that it can result in inconsistencies with established State law and the fact that State populations only vote for a fraction of Federal lawmakers.

Arizona in specific allows the consideration of State and Federal Statutes in determining the existence of a duty of care (all legislative sources). I had failed to bring up the concept of duty of care at all in the W.D. Wash. case alongside a description of what I saw constituted individual harm as a result of an alleged Federal Statute violation, so that's likely why the Bank Secrecy Act violation basis for my Motion for Joinder was not considered in itself as a basis for cognizable harm. Now I realize I could have attempted to invoke 'negligence per se', especially because this would have been in a Federal Court context so I don't see how there could have been controversy regarding comity with State law and specific States' concepts of duty of care (where common law negligence would normally lie otherwise).

Regardless, because DNS and web host companies do not fit cleanly under the scope of financial institutions (network providers of money transmitter businesses explicitly not included in the scope of the Bank Secrecy Act, even though there is a clause recognizing 'contextual factors' for determination of a money transmitter situation), I decided to frame a claim upon a primarily contractual basis with public policy elements.

Even within a primarily contractual basis, I am arguing for the existence of a public policy duty of care per Arizona precedent because ICANN's contract, which includes Know Your Customer acquisition and retention clauses, was set up as part of the Department of Commerce acting as a partner and authority in the creation of DNS-related policies after it selected ICANN to act as the organization in charge of privatizing Internet policies. This isn't fully a 'private industry standard' from that standpoint in my view, and Arizona does not explicitly discount administrative law or regulations from consideration as part of 'great care' in determining non-legislative sources of specifically defined duties. Therefore, I don't see it as a merely 'implied duty' to acquire and keep such records, especially when the legislature does recognize self-similar KYC standards for financial institutions (the Bank Secrecy Act). This to me is no different than FASB's partnership with the SEC to create accounting standards in the United States.

There then could be room to argue against the existence of a duty of care from a public policy basis because Know Your Customer standards regarding the DNS and web hosting industry do not fit cleanly into a legislative Statutory context, but the government explicitly opted to set these standards via a partnership of administrative oversight and a private company which is not unusual. How else is anyone on a civil level supposed to have a reasonable expectation of receiving information about accused tort harmers in an Internet domain context?

After that, in an Arizona context, breach, causation, damages and foreseeability are part of factual analysis which a jury would ideally conduct in a Court situation (or the Judge otherwise in a dispositive judgment situation such as default judgment if summoned Defendants don't reply, or some other form of judgment where the right to a trial has been mutually declined or where one side doesn't assert the right). This is where the companies gave me data, but even after reconstructing an address in Mandarin that looks plausible, this predictably did nothing to match any of the building tenants to the obviously pseudonymous name associated with the primary web URL in controversy. The registrant information for the second domain which served as an account registration confirmation system for the first URL also involved a complete nonsense address (random letters) that couldn't even be researched, besides yet another name which looked obviously pseudonymous to me. So I argue the companies have responsibility for ongoing harm (ongoing inability to reasonably find and serve process to currently unknown Defendants as they are specifically defined by their activities in using DNS and web hosting activities over the economic theft they are accused of conducting via fraud and laudnering) if this unique data cannot actually be accurately provided for any reason. Again, where this is data which they should have acquired and stored, as well as to a plausibly accurate degree to prevent and restrain harms that are known to occur via websites (i.e. all of the American losses to Internet fraud harm that the IC3 has reported, let alone all of the potential unreported losses).

I also don't see the provision of plausibly accurate customer data for good cause as a potentially 'limitless duty' to just anyone because good cause has to be established for such information release in civil contexts. In any event, the information should have been acquired and stored as described. As a separate but preceding matter, W.D. Wash. had found for the validity of such information disclosure in Federal case precedent (non-privileged information disclosure about unknown Defendants because they were specifically defined, previous actions taken toward their identification had been outlined, and an allegation of fraudulent activity had been defined with particularity). This isn't a finding based in legislative sources of law, but I find that it is a separate matter from whether or not the information was stored and whether it is accurate (the existence of a duty of care and the factual analysis surrounding a possible breach).

Though W.D. Wash. had to presume an alleged basis of harm in inadequate discovery responses because I had not alleged a duty of care in any other way in my Motion for Joinder, the means by which data was released doesn't matter in my view after reviewing standards for duties of care. I didn't see a solid means of alleging a duty of care from a Federal Statute perspective alone due to DNS and web hosts being out of scope in the Bank Secrecy Act's focus on the finance industry (even if just barely out of scope), but regardless, data was found for good cause release in a civil controversy context. Whether the data should have been stored (existence of a duty of care) and whether any released data is accurate within the presumed reason for its acquisition and storage in preventing and restraining customer harms (a factual allegation around any data that is released) is the actual duty of care controversy. Whether data was released or was refused to be released at all, either via voluntary discussion or via subpoena, only has to do with the means of release in that context. From a discovery standpoint, litigants can request Parties to correct their discovery responses via FRCP Rule 37 or equivalent State measures, but W.D. Wash. did not consider any sanctions for non-response as such and such provisions would not have aided in restoring the victim anyway (sanctions benefit the particular Court system in fines; not the litigants).

This to me is in contrast to British Commonwealth-style standards where the validity for the release of non-privileged data about those mixed up in using services to the harm of third-parties is defined in case law that effectively became a Statute and/or established injunctive protocol throughout that civil legal sphere (Norwich Pharmacal); not a standard that has remained stuck at the case law level. However, the requirement in anti-money laundering laws to attain and retain customer information, at least for financial institutions, is similar.

8/6/2025 - I can see an avenue to attack the basis for a public policy duty of care in that it is based in part in a private set of standards, even if there is the complication of it being based in partnership with an administrative law authority that used to have total control over the matter until the Memorandum of Understanding.

However, this is the only real source for authoritatively contouring what DNS services ought to be doing in a minimum framework sense. There is nothing else on a Statutory basis in the United States, except that the same standards overlap the Bank Secrecy Act (standards which were clearly not made up from whole cloth). As far as the Statute itself, 'mere providers of networks for money transmitters' are scoped out explicitly except possibly under a review of context and mitigating circumstances. The USA GAO said in its contemporary report that devolving administrative regulatory function to a private organization was within the abilities afforded to government departments by Congress (https://www.gao.gov/assets/ogc-00-33r.pdf). Even though direct oversight by the Department of Commerce ended in 2016, ICANN's essential DNS registrar contract that contains basic, non-privileged WhoIs data acquisition and retention clauses from 2009 was created within the oversight period, where its 2013 version approved in 2024 for DNS contracts tendered after January 2024 contains the same language and where the government still partners with ICANN on certain topics anyway. This was then never entirely the same as the relation between FASB and the SEC where FASB creates rules for the SEC to adopt into the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but has the same essential qualities of public-private partnership.

This is ultimately why I find that it isn't unfair to showcase ICANN's contract as essentially acting as a public policy duty of care for Internet matters due to it being the only real source of such authority on this topic to prevent and restrain Internet-specific economic harms as enabled by modern websites commonly being able to interact with banks, credit processors and blockchains. It is a USA-specific DNS provider matter so it does not revolve around any of the controversies around other countries and regions that petition the United Nations to create less US-centric methods of Internet governance.

Also, there is still ultimately the other basis in treating the matter as a private contract even if the public policy basis is defeated, which is why I thought it prudent to attempt arbitration as the means of first resort to begin with, and then move to a Court case as a backup option to ask for compelling arbitration and to alternatively proceed with the matter as a Superior Court claim over the public policy duty of care legal standard. To show that a basis in ICANN's contract as an entirely private contract matter is unwarranted, the balance of interests test that I proposed has to be defeated. Namely, that it needs to be argued that it would be unfair to ignore a 'no third party benefits' clause, even in a situation where the accurate release of customer data to third parties harmed by specifically defined customers (defined by their activities using the DNS service) in order for the third parties to pursue them is the entire matter in controversy. This is why I framed it as a narrow, contoured argument for conferring a benefit to third parties where a failure for the accurate release of data for good cause contradicts the presumed purpose for requiring DNS services to attain and retain a minimum of non-privileged accurate data about customers (prevent and restrain any harms they may cause). I have decisively been unable to receive law enforcement investigative assistance for any enforcement action they may be able to take outside the bounds of needing to prove cognizable harm. ICANN also never apparently enforced their own KYC requirements themselves; only worked with the web host segment of the business in controversy to shut down the primary website in controversy and then asked me to work with the DNS service as part of the ICANN case that I started in September 2022.

The line of attack from a factual basis might be that because I was able to reconstruct one physical address from the WhoIs disclosure into full Mandarin, that there's no controversy here because the data is seemingly usable (eventually constructed a plausible physical address in Chinese characters that showed up in the HK Land Registry after starting from a pinyin version without intonation markers).

However, the name associated with the URL (the WhoIs data) looked pseudonymous to me and unsurprisingly, the HK Land Registry for tenants whose occupancy in the flat overlapped with events in controversy were nothing like that name. I revealed the Cantonese surnames but because that registry is technically pay to search (albeit only $25 HKD), I haven't explicitly revealed the results page to anyone; only the receipt showing that I had made a search on that address.

The second URL in controversy involved in acting as an account registration confirmation mechanism for the primary URL also consisted of completely scrambled letters for the reported physical address, besides a pseudonymous-looking name. Plus other issues with both including phone numbers that yielded different names via True Caller than any of the reported WhoIs 'names' and the land registry names; and with obviously one-time burner emails being reported because they had the acronym 'btc' in them for Bitcoin. I don't see how I could accurately and thus ethically use the data for a summons; anyone I summon off the tenant list could argue that their names are not confirmed or verified in relation to the primary URL.

In contrast, CEX.IO LTD gave me data about the CEX.IO transaction in controversy in plausible detail for both name and address, including a full Chinese character version when I asked but I was able to get the pinyin (without intonation markers) version reconstructed beforehand. Only that the confirmed address in Chinese characters made reference to an alternate landmark (a subway station) and a different nearby street. CEX.IO was able to confirm that data came directly from a passport; no such confirmation as to how information was verified in the WhoIs data situation.

Controversy over identifying bank customers on an international comity basis; formulating an initial duty of care logic - 8/14/2025

Because we were granted leave for good cause to seek information from a bank regarding an in-tandem bank transaction along a cryptocurrency transaction in controversy that the one identified and summoned Defendant disclosed, partially identifying someone who received cryptocurrency from the Tokenlon-interfacing over the counter wallet in controversy and passed it to the Defendant within six minutes, the problem I knew would happen was gaining non-privileged personally identifiable information from the bank because of the likelihood that the transaction took place via a mainland Chinese counterparty branch. This also doesn't mean that person in controversy controlled the Tokenlon-interfacing wallet which would be important to identify for understanding the mid-point of all interactions, where the Tokenlon-interfacing account received cryptocurrency immediately from the defrauded hosted wallet account. Nevertheless, going through bank discovery on an international basis is an important civil exercise in my estimation.

The bank did seem to acknowledge the Federal basis of the request because it asked me to subpoena a different USA counterparty at the Federal tax level. I had sent a request to a Seattle counterparty and a San Francisco branch had actually answered to essentially deny being able to productively help at all, even to deny having any relevant data, and said that commands should be redirected to the New York branch of a different Federal tax ID bank network of the same overall global bank (the non-N.A.-suffix one).

Predictably, the 'Ltd.' Federal entity version of the same global bank via its third-party legal counsel denied having any responsibility, even to deny having any relevant information, solely alleging that the Court Order could only possibly involve the mainland Chinese entity even though the Order didn't get into exact counterparty entities. Neither had I in my original Motion, so the Order granting good cause electronic data discovery followed the same wording. Nevertheless, the law firm indirectly asserted the Chinese counterparty entities' sole relevance such that the Hague Evidence Convention had to be utilized with no other explanation or logic given.

The next play then is that because I can't reasonably move for any relief via the Hague Evidence Convention for pre-trial evidence because mainland China excludes considering any such requests in its Article 23 full exclusion, this is where I find 'negligence per se' on a Federal Statute level exists. Namely, that I'm not receiving replies about customer records (Bank Secrecy Act) that these Federal bank entities should have, or where they should be able to speak to whether they have or not, given that the person in controversy plausibly might have USA accounts as an accused money launderer. Further, Hong Kong in particular doesn't preclude pre-trial evidence requests in support of foreign cases (no such Hague Evidence exclusions), and requires banks to have information on their customers and to disclose basic personally identifiable information about them for good cause in a similar anti-money laundering law and in Norwich precedent. The Bank Secrecy Act is also explicitly included as a Statute entailing a private right of action for violations, where the total set of included Statutes in 18 U.S.C. 1962 is under district courts' purview to prevent and restrain harms per section 1964.

The basis for harm under an asserted negligent lack of productive response (either to produce electronic records, or to explain why they have no such data and why they can't procure any such records from other counterparties (whether international or not)) is then the permanent stymying of the case to effect proportionate recovery for the victim via this possible Defendant accused of money laundering.

Even in a mainland Chinese sense, its anti-money laundering laws stipulate financial institutions to hold client data and that disclosures about them can take place under relevant laws. Its data disclosure law in the cross-border section allows businesses to share individuals' data non-consensually (when absolutely necessary) if a contract with the requester under the cyberspace department's purview is tendered, or if another compliance method is met under the law (four methods listed). In my view, there is then no excuse as to why a USA bank branch counterparty could not be responsible for working through these laws to the fullest extent possible with the mainland Chinese counterparty entities to either procure relevant data or to explain why it cannot be released. In comparison, I have no individual power under the Hague Evidence exclusions to make any submittals via ILCC.online and to expect such requests to be productively judicially executed. This isn't the same as Hague Service Requests that undergo comparatively little or no judicial review for execution.

The underlying basis of the whole matter is that funds were taken from US commerce to non-US locations. This applies to accused launderers as far as jurisdiction when they are identified and summoned to a case, but I can't even complete that much until a given person is fully identified (at least a complete confirmation of the name and a physical address, or last-known address).

Even though I have been unable to receive any sort of Federal District Court relief over various unproductively responsive third parties for various reasons, this situation definitively involves a financial institution. There is Federal case precedent in international comity tests to hold USA counterparties responsible for responses even from international counterparties in a contoured discovery context, i.e. if the laws of the counterparty's region don't explicitly exclude disclosure. That's why I find even for mainland Chinese data, there is a chance for a favorable ruling of some sort to hold a relevant USA bank counterparty responsible for some sort of productive responses from any such counterparties, but I'll wait thirty days since the original unproductive response from the 'N.A.'-suffix Federal tax entity to move for such relief.

The hole from a duty of care standpoint is that I'm not alleging damages (a factual component) and it involves a third party, whereas duty of care is usually analyzed from a basis in law to establish a claim in the first place and then the factual elements are ideally analyzed by a jury. I'm rather invoking it for interlocutory relief so I'm asking for immediate analysis of a legal and factual basis, and that it isn't solely a deficient discovery allegation given that I am couching this as a duty of care basis in a Federal Statute. Whereas in the DNS and web host situations, I had not explicitly invoked duty of care in the Federal District Court case and on review, I didn't want to submit a motion to amend the Complaint toward continuing to attempt adding them as Defendants when they didn't fit cleanly into the Bank Secrecy Act anyway.

If I am ruled against regarding a granting of any interlocutory relief from any USA counterparty branches of this bank in controversy in the bank's status as a third party, and instead am ordered to file a motion for leave to amend the Complaint again to add the bank as a Defendant, fine. The point though is to couch a duty of care claim for some sort of relief in ongoing harm caused by negligence. Unproductive responses in spite of the Bank Secrecy Act's recordkeeping and verification requirements for understanding customers and that relevant information was found for good cause release as a preceding matter, and in spite of equivalent laws in other countries for the bank's counterparty entities which do not preclude the USA branches from being responsible for productive responses from them (some path for data disclosure not precluded under those laws), is the controversy here (lack of data provision or reasonable steps demonstrated toward attaining relevant data from counterparties even at non-USA locations, or an explanation as to why other counterparties can't release relevant data in spite of all relevant local laws being followed for the data's release).

Refinement of cognizable harm assertions regarding specific types of corporations' duty to attain and retain accurate identifiable information about customers and to release data in good cause circumstances - 8/26/2025

In essence, the counsel for the web host and DNS companies essentially asserted in an Answer document to the arbitral Claim that a basis for cognizable harm did not exist in any way because of a lack of responsibility for customers' harms under Section 230 ('safe harbor') and that ICANN's 'no third-party benefits' clauses absolutely applied. This was disappointing to see a complete lack of engagement with the arguments where I had already anticipated all of these assertions. I find that they really need to attack my contradiction finding-basis and fair interpretation-basis argument in both a public policy and private contract sense to have a convincing counter-argument, but the formulaic reply wasn't entirely surprising. However, that leads me to further defining my conception of cognizable harm in such circumstances, anyway.

Because I assert there is a duty to understand customers in specific corporate situations, where even in this web host services circumstance there is a clause in ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement that 'any person' can bring up WhoIs data concerns and that they should expect an effort on the services' part toward mitigating inaccuracies (a private right of action in a sense), and where reasonable customer verification procedures are mandated (similar to anti-money laundering laws for financial institutions), this is a preceding matter before any customers cause harm. The companies are fully in control of whether or not they take on any specific customers, and so it's their choice whether to violate contractual or Statutory clauses to understand them completely and to be able to describe how their identities were verified.

The problem on an individual harm scale is when customers that these companies do not understand cause economic harms, such as theft by fraud followed by money laundering, against third parties via the companies' services. On a duty of care basis, whether via a State standard or a Federal Statute 'negligence per se' basis in a US context or other Statutory basis in another regions' laws, if the customers cannot be accurately identified to those seeking the data for good cause (again, whether by Statute or some other basis as a matter even preceding duty of care), that is where I find the economic harm lies. It isn't that the companies have a direct responsibility for the customers' harms, but that the negligence in not understanding them and then being unable to disclose their identities for good cause as a result in effect permanently stymies the ability of a victim of the customers' activities from restraining the customers' harm (pursuing damages from them).

In such circumstances, I don't see how it would then not be fair to value the negligence in failing to understand the customers at the same minimal value as the harm they caused (e.g., the value of stolen assets), given that the customers cannot be pursued as specifically defined by their status as users of the service through which they caused harm. If the customers could be identified by the services who are supposed to know about them, there would be no problem to pursue them (full capability to take action to restrain their harms), but this is impossible if they are not accurately identifiable.

In a website services situation where stolen assets via fraudulent misrepresentation were transferred to downstream locations, in theory it may be possible to find cryptocurrency wallet holders' identities or bank account identities where the information overlaps with any data procured from web host and DNS services, but this isn't the same as the services fully identifying website registrants in controversy. In our situation, I haven't found anyone with an address or name match with the website WhoIs data that I was able to procure from downstream sources. And again, the primary domain's registrant name is pseudonymous without any matches in the land registry data that I pulled up, so there's no reason to trust the physical address I have anyway; let alone that the second domain's data is complete nonsense.

This may be a relatively 'novel' approach in asserting a private cognizable harm because of Know Your Customer data provisions of any sort typically being enforced via public enforcement (fines for non-cooperation or data failures), but I don't see how this is an inherently unfair conception. Especially when the whole matter stymies my ability to pursue threefold damages under Federal Statute regarding the web host and DNS service registrants under US anti-money laundering laws in particular, whereas I can't pursue an equivalent amount from the services because they aren't neatly categorizable as money transmitters or other financial institutions.

Again, such corporations don't have to prove that there are alternate ways to understand the customers in their counter-arguments, but they should be able to describe why it would be unfair to hold them to specifically defined KYC standards on a duty of care basis. I haven't seen that occur with the website-related services and neither with Binance.

Explicitly defining money laundering activity in relation to an individual duty of care, whether or not the original form of unlawful activity is known by a given recipient - 8/28/2025

Because I hadn't formulated a cognizable harm in relation to anti-money laundering laws on the parts of downstream recipients given that they cannot necessarily be tied to having knowledge of the initial fraud and initial laundering events, a decision to issue an order to show cause in relation to the one identified downstream Defendant took place solely in regard to the Commodity Exchange Act as a preceding matter. This was essentially my fault in not tying the alleged anti-money laundering violations to cognizable harm, resulting in the Court needing to apparently tie a cognizable harm analysis to the basis I had provided regarding the website registrants where the whole point of the first amended Complaint was to separate the Defendants by class of activity.

The logic was there, but a basis for cognizable harm hadn't been expressed to complete the analysis on a wholly separate basis of harm without any sort of implied reliance on harms caused by the activities of website registrants. Once again as in other scenarios, I saw no choice in this situation (as part of a second amended Complaint) except to couch violations of money laundering laws in a duty of care under a Federal Statute. That means as a preceding matter in such a scenario, the recipients have to be shown to have known or that they ought to have known that receiving cryptocurrency in controversy took place as part of benefitting from money laundering, even without knowing the form of original unlawful activity (the theft and initial money laundering in this situation). Again, when the events are taken in isolation, to me this entails the over-the-counter nature of the transactions and thus the ultimately unknown origin of the cryptocurrency as establishing that they should have known they were benefitting from money laundering supply sources.

An individual duty of care conception under this logic, to me, then applies when specific victims identify those who handled their assets and show proof of original ownership of them. It is then a limited and specifically defined duty; not a duty owed to just anyone whose assets may have been handled by a given recipient. The Federal duty of care conclusion to me is that the value of the stolen assets, which the recipient benefitted from, should then be returned by the recipient to the known specifically defined victim. A refusal to return the assets is then Federal 'negligence per se' to return known stolen assets which were attained by the recipient via money laundering in some way.

This logic then is similar to defining a specific duty of care under Know Your Customer standards in relation to the duty of a service provider to understand their customers. That is, in good cause situations where they ought to be able to accurately disclose specific customers to third parties and where a failure to be able to identify them in such circumstances, in my view, constitutes limited and defined negligence in rendering the customers' harms unrestrainable. This is not the same as alleging the service providers as having direct responsibility for the harms, but as a result of any such negligence which results in rendering the customers' harms unrestrainable, I see no choice except to value the negligence at the same amount as the economic harms caused by the customers.

Because the current identified Defendant is a mainland Chinese citizen, I still related the Federal anti-money laundering law to foreign law in that I find that that specific Defendant, and any other mainland Chinese Defendant that may be identified and summoned, should have known they were violating equivalent definitions of money laundering (transactions that serve to cover up financial fraud), where I find this reasonably applies whether or not resulting continued obfuscations of the original theft occurred deliberately or because of the nature of a continuing series of downstream over-the-counter transactions, and where there are defined investigative procedures.

I don't see a fundamental conflict between the Federal US and mainland Chinese laws as a result. I'm also explicitly mentioning the private right of action of the US law again and that personal jurisdiction can Statutorily apply to non-US persons if the transactions have origin in the United States. The alleged violations under Chinese law that I had mentioned before (trade of cryptocurrency when it is formally banned in terms of trade platform entities being outlawed before events in controversy) and their likely knowing participation in some way and to some degree in money laundering were seen at most as allegations of harm against society, so a specifically defined duty of care to me is what will tie it together regarding the individual circumstances of this case. Primarily, though, I wanted to address foreign law because such recipients did not necessarily know that given assets had origin in US transactions at the time of handling, where the US Federal anti-money laundering law also recognizes violations under foreign law.

Causing a stir with the bank entity motion to compel - 9/3/2025

Finally I incurred the Court's rancor to some extent because I thought I was making an argument in good faith as to why it would be valid to subpoena USA bank entities and expect a response consistent with Federal institutional and international comity, citing relevant laws, but instead a prior order around only being able to seek data from mainland Chinese entities in China regarding Hague Service matters was upheld in spite of other case precedent around specifically Hague Evidence matters, and that pre-trial evidence requests are plainly precluded from consideration in mainland China. This was then taken to be 'another' drain on Court resources due to a 'pattern' of failed motions. Further, that I then hadn't 'property conferred' outside of Court first.

This is disappointing to be accused of willfully trying to 'drain' Court resources with frivolous arguments when I put significant effort into constructing each argument. A number of preceding matters (including case-specific matters which are now apparently barred from ever being loosened relative to other case precedent) are used as an absolute means to preclude analyzing a number of the primary legal arguments in multiple situations. I do see the reasoning as a matter of fairness; however, to me it still doesn't mean that the arguments I'm putting out that were entirely ignored in favor of certain preceding matters are then 'frivolous.' They weren't examined at all because of the preceding matters, which is fine, but then let's just keep it at that.

Otherwise, I indeed very much don't see any sort of attempt at gaining pre-trial evidence via the Hague Evidence Convention from a mainland Chinese entity to go anywhere and explained exactly why. Then cited the precedent around banks in particular for gaining information from counterparty entities in a way which is consistent with Federal institutional comity and international comity. However, again, it wasn't considered because of the preceding matter of this particular case barring seeking evidence in any other way except directly from mainland Chinese entities via the Hague Evidence Convention when it involves probable mainland Chinese activities.

Apparently, I also should have been putting word counts directly in Motions, but I have been sending the MS Word versions with a word count in the email draft. Easy enough to fix this anyway, and I can figure out including a meet and confer certification but it was very clear that the bank entity was not going to cooperate further.

It's fair to say 'motion denied' for the procedural reasons, but I don't see a reason to call out 'frivolity' over attempting to make nuanced arguments that are in-line with other precedent just because preceding matters or case-specific orders aren't being fulfilled. I don't see how it's frivolous or unfair to analyze a Hague Evidence matter differently than a Hague Service matter in relation to international comity, for example, given mainland China's stance barring pre-trial evidence requests.

All that really needed to be cited is that I indeed had missed following the local civil rules regarding showing certification of a good faith attempt to confer before attempting a motion to compel (I hadn't attempted to set a conference time) and that would be it since the rest of the argument doesn't have to be considered after that. I don't see how that's a drain on Court resources, then; the motion can be simply denied on that procedural failure. However, there was in essence an email exchange actively going on without any apparent attempt on the other side to express willingness to create a conference; what I should have done then is offer a specific conference time and then show that refusal had occurred due to a lack of further response after thirty days or so. I had done this more effectively with the web host DNS entity even though I still hadn't explicitly listed out the date, time and manner of a conference attempt in an explicit certification section.

Besides that, solving this entire issue, especially cross-border discovery from mainland China, is a highly complex topic on the civil level and I can't completely agree that it is a 'drain on resources' to explore every angle possible in the face of these complexities. I have gotten further than any Federal civil case precedent that I can find so I'm nevertheless glad on that account, even though I still ended up missing exact procedural matters and mistakenly believed that I could still cite nuanced case precedent to deal with situations that I find are different from prior motion attempts.

I will ultimately express regret and apologize due to the Court feeling the need to call the action simply 'meritless' and 'frivolous' due to the initial preceding separate entity concerns and previous Motions' failures when I go to make a status report about initially contacting mainland China's Central Authority about attaining evidence from the bank. However, I think it's ultimately an expression of the lack of mechanisms in US Federal District Court to uphold Know Your Customer standards on an individual scale. There is always one or more of a separate entity, a personal jurisdiction or a cognizable harm defect (relative to Federal case precedent) precluding the contemplation of a judicial remedy, even if under specific conditions they all seem like the elements come together properly. I haven't been able to find any Federal private action civil cases that have actually enforced accurate discovery, including those that didn't bother to try it.

I.e., as in this situation, not even bank counterparty entities will seriously be considered to have responsibilities to communicate with one another even when another counterparty entities' anti-money laundering and disclosure laws is consistent with the United States, unless apparently it solely is a matter of a Judgment Creditor situation. I sincerely thought that the argument had a chance in this Doe Defendant discovery situation due to the nature of banks as a global network in particular. Excluding that I did get impatient and didn't allow a full attempt at a conference to take place, in spite of the obvious direction the emails were going in with the US bank counterparty branches.

This is why I've seen no choice except transferring to other jurisdictions, or attempting to do so, regarding such fundamental KYC issues. However, I definitely don't see a way to do so regarding mainland Chinese entities in a way which will be enforceable without launching legal cases directly in that jurisdiction via mainland Chinese lawyers. It doesn't seem promising to do anything in that jurisdiction at all when making judicial accounts and accessing most judicial resources is barred from non-Chinese IP addresses. That's why I featured this type of problem in all of my comity analyses; to me it is in fact a serious comity concern in the balance of interests (mainland China's absolute exclusion of Hague Evidence Convention Article 23 precluding pre-trial evidence requests, and other jurisdictions not even providing a refusal reason consistent with Article 12 despite having Article 23 qualified exclusions).

Oh well; it's all feedback and helps contour and define what can be done in a private civil context regarding these issues. That's why I'm ultimately fine taking some lumps about it; similar cases have not bothered to get this far. However, it very much demonstrates that 'good cause' findings for the release of data can have intense difficulties reaching actual enforceability in any sense, even when it involves data that an entity should have by some standard. Mainland China, Hong Kong, etc. all have bank entity laws requiring the upkeep of client identities just the same as the United States, for example. The good cause release standard in US Federal District Court is well-defined in private action civil cases, but meeting all factors to enforce accurate data's release in a Federal context is the problem.

I guess I'll call it even in that relative to the comparative judicial frivolity that I'm apparently causing, in spite of the research I'm doing to control as many factors as I can, my cross-judicial Letter of Request applications in their current forms have still been ignored. I had crafted them to include the exact references in law to justify a district court sending such Letters, and mentioned this again in a Status Report. However, it's obvious that they won't be processed. I think one of the problems, then, is being on the same level of understanding in regards to international mechanisms where US Federal District Court Judges don't seem to experience this coming up very often in terms of requests to actually submit one for good cause to a Central Authority. I only ever was able to find one example of a US Federal District Court Judge actually sending one out.

Again, I generally regret causing an issue on par with other cases I've seen where they were also told to stop pushing for data disclosure in a manner disallowed by a prior Order, but I sincerely thought that I had justifiable separate entity responsibility arguments due to the types of entities and those entities' treatment in Federal case precedent in comparison to cryptocurrency exchanges and DNS services.

The fact is that I also had to originally re-file the case multiple times, ultimately over the fact that I had not specifically defined cryptocurrency as being a commodity future (essentially, the case precedent establishing it as such) but similar Federal cases I've seen concerning cryptocurrency theft didn't have to do this. Then those ones ultimately ran into the complexity of accurate data release that I am thoroughly enmeshed in.

Every single matter is subject to a minimally-posited basis for rejection on the basis of saving Federal Court resources, so I'm not sure how an otherwise effort-filled argument being minimally rejected such that the rest of the argument could in fact be all that 'frivolous' in entirety. I'll accept that anyway and apologize for it, but I didn't make up an argument without literally ANY legal argumentative basis in these situations. The arguments about data holding parties were rejected on a Federal basis at times for preceding minimal basis reasons regardless of other mitigating circumstances. That's fine; that's the Court system doing its job and this type of complex situation has not been dealt with in depth so I don't see the concern from a resource viewpoint. Minimal resources were spent in such situations to reject such arguments. Still, I will make reference in any further motions for default judgment how I'm only intending to bring up separate entity matters in regards to asset discovery in Judgment Creditor situations regarding banks and no other contexts to indicate that I'm not intending to commit any more 'frivolity' regarding separate entity arguments, and will not be attempting any more remedies from data holders.

Even though I regret the reaction, ultimately I'm not sure how I can be entirely faulted for attempting to push the boundary on this aspect of the case. I saw bank entity situations as having precedent for making an argument around the validity of US entities for seeking information even if it may be at other counterparty branches. It was taken to be a violation of an absolute barring of seeking information from different entities than the ones specifically proscribed in previous instances and that's fine, but I'm not sure if that justifies the reaction in simply accusing me of completely meritless and frivolous arguments. Again, part of this lies exactly in an attempt to dismiss arguments based on what minimally invalidates them, and that's fine, but I don't need additional drama about it. I'm attempting to solve a highly complex situation which is rarely dealt with in Federal private action contexts so it entails considerable difficulty in what can be done.

It doesn't invalidate other aspects of the case, anyway, even though the next question is whether a duty of care basis regarding downstream money laundering activity will hold up. I have no idea if that will be analyzed anytime soon or if I have to put in another motion for default (entry) for a basis for analysis to be triggered, or if there may even be a meet and confer order around the one identified Defendant again despite the previous lack of intent on his part to confer at all in regards to the current meet and confer order. Followed by the basis for downstream Defendants' cognizable harms only being questioned until I had gone through attempting motions for judgment against the one identified Defendant.

All of this is, however, a dialectical process or conversational interplay in a judicial sense so I'm not sure how my motions for judgment failing in that regard could count against me being involved in frivolous activity simply because of a high rate of motion failure. What else is new? Professional lawyers go through this as well, including other cases where lawyers went too far in attempting to achieve discovery in more directly violative senses than I have done.

I should have known that summary judgment requests entail every single possible controversy being incontrovertibly addressed would come up, but questions around cognizable harm for downstream Defendants weren't addressed until after I had even put in a motion for default (entry) afterwards as ordered. There was no clue given about what was still in controversy regarding the summary judgment motion, besides that I had not listed the evidence with specificity by document and page number again, which had already been done in the Complaint and the motion for joinder.

I still obviously respect the process and want to keep participating, but the procedurals are indeed sometimes a lot to deal with even by my standards of accepting decisions at face value and learning from them. It's simply unfortunate to finally have been accused of frivolity simply for trying every conceivable angle possible to solve aspects of this case, and where I found enough of a unique circumstance to attempt such a motion again as it relates to compelling some form of relief over Know Your Customer standards. Again, just rejecting the motion without the drama would be fine with me. This case in particular does have social significance given the rarity of such cases getting anywhere at all even though I realize it is ultimately a private individual situation, but I'm not sure if that's fully appreciated.

It's not my fault that blocking laws such as full exclusions of Hague Evidence Convention Article 23 exist, and thus that I'm attempting to take them into account. Researching other sources, mainland China has internal blocking laws to match its Hague Evidence Convention stance as well which has variously caused US Federal District Courts to need to consider allowing witnesses to be deposed in Hong Kong and Aomen, etc. The FACEBOOK INC v. XIU NETWORK SHENZHEN TECHNOLOGY CO LTD case which keeps getting absolutely quoted at me as a reason to have to use the Hague Evidence Convention only had to do with service by email in a Hague Service Convention stance; nothing to do with the comity issues encountered in an evidence convention situation (such as this situation of trying to obtain the identification of a customer from a bank for good cause). But for whatever actual reason related to judicial resource use or otherwise, comity tests are not even being utilized in these situations relative to our case. I will ultimately put in a Hague Evidence Convention request but I don't expect such a pre-trial request for customer identification to be approved because of the blocking law issues, which I've been consistently bringing up since earlier filings.

Apparent drift away from conducting comity tests and other balance of interest tests whatsoever in favor of the Hague Convention in US Federal District Court decisions since Aerospatiale - 9/11/2025

Looking back overall on the research I've conducted and interlocutory decisions in our case regarding third party entities, in modern US Federal District Court cases in terms of enforcing depositions in spite of the Hague Convention's procedures, cases at one point started to include it as ONE comity factor which was the start of Aerospatiale's precedent apparently breaking down [PrivacyLaw.com]. Now it's clearly been getting utilized as a SOLE comity factor at times, even if there are blocking laws or other issues duly presented for consideration, as I'm experiencing. In the Binance and OKG Tech situations I've been going through, personal jurisdiction was indeed a problem but the Court ultimately ignored my latest Applications requesting cross-judicial assistance, in spite of showing why tribunals can send such Letters according to the United States Code, when it was clear the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong weren't going to listen to me alone. The winnowing of Aerospatiale has consequences in Judgment Creditor situations in particular because then the Evidence Convention has to be consulted as one comity factor (in the least) in the balance of interests to enforce deposition of a US bank counterparty about an overseas counterparty whose region has similar disclosure laws, or making similar accommodations in other overseas deposition situations.

If it weren't for some US Federal District Courts' apparent modern vigilance over now obeying the Hague Evidence Convention's procedures absolutely to attain deposition, or in otherwise telling litigants to send a subpoena via the Hague Service Convention alone which would not entail ANY sort of chance of enforcement in the overseas region, especially when there are clear blocking laws but where some US decisions have at least allowed for changes of region for deposition [LanguageAlliance.com], I don't see how a finding for a separate US entity in general taking responsibility to confer with its overseas entity when disclosure laws are otherwise similar in such circumstances, such as anti-money laundering laws regarding the upkeep of customer data and narrow good cause disclosure allowances (or where there is a clear procedure for gaining disclosure in the other region which is not readily available directly to overseas litigants) is such an outlandish concept. It still makes sense to me even outside of core Judgment Creditor situations involving banks where comity tests in US Federal precedent specifically primarily lies. This has been the whole issue in attaining accurate disclosure from overseas cryptocurrency firms (now considered to be money transmitters in the US as well as in Commonwealth regions all the same) in a cost-effective manner by US litigants in the explicitly digital asset-related interlocutory decisions I keep reading and referencing in our case, and as to why it's so difficult to reliably achieve some level of judicial punishment otherwise (sanctions/etc.) when such entities do not have accurate data or do not respond whatsoever.

The second issue is then having a clearly-stated cognizable harm or assertion for liability even for enforcement of third-party deposition, even when involving a US-headquartered company, because of a gradual winnowing of 'implied' private rights of action to then needing to reference Statutes with explicitly-defined private rights of action, and now in also needing to cite cognizable harm or liability in a specifically defined way on top of that in an economic sense; especially in the evolution of US State Court precedent. Though the web services situation in our case turned out to lack standing for enforcement over deficient discovery alone, such discovery and ensuring its accuracy is no less integral to Doe Discovery cases, just like deposing a bank or money transmitter over assets in a Judgment Creditor situation. I couldn't find a way to link KYC requirements of DNS hosts to Federal law directly so I didn't feel confident in trying to explicitly reformulate an argument with a cognizable harm/liability component in a Federal context, which would have been a duty of care liability argument relative to Federal law.

The common factor then is a judicial finding for foundational defects to preclude Federal District Courts from even undertaking a comprehensive balance of interests analysis in the first place. The finding for a foundational defect is then grounds for throwing out any further analysis; essentially that the singular defect is so great that other factors should not be considered. Yet, such modern foundational defect findings in overseas disclosure enforcement and in needing explicit cognizable harms stated even in that context were not always quite as such looking at previous precedent into the 2010's. In the least, US Federal District Courts still take blocking laws seriously so it's still confusing to me why the specific issues I cited in regard to mainland China in particular were not taken seriously as a factor. Especially when it's framed solely as a Hague Service concern when that would not entail even a chance of enforceability because that merely involves process serving a US subpoena.

The net effect is to make the endeavor of gaining third-party disclosure in an accurate manner much less assured in a US Federal District Court context than it might otherwise have been when Courts were in full respect of the Aerospatiale precedent. This has unfortunately occurred alongside the rise in digital assets and attendant theft events taking advantage of pseudonymity such that any digital asset-related civil case inevitably features unknown Defendants that then need to be discovered as a fundamental requirement of such cases, and often from overseas money transmitter services (overseas deposition) who should have the data as a matter of their regions' anti-money laundering laws. That's why I've started to spend significant of my own resources toward private enforcement of Know Your Customer standards on a specifically defined duty of care basis, even though it's had to take place in other jurisdictions as a result.

That is what it is in current US Federal case precedent, but it has attendant consequences for litigants dealing with such complex cross-border situations.

All of this also puts into question if contracts such as ICANN's Know Your Customer regime, even in regards to that particular contract effectively having origin in a public-private partnership, might gain the same scrutiny in an arbitral context if Federal analysis of balance of interest factors has become so singular and absolute in certain respects. If Federal standards have gone in that direction, why wouldn't arbitral standards then take the same direction? That is, even that kind of contract which DNS service providers must abide by has 'no third party benefits' absolute clauses in spite of there being no other KYC mechanisms in existence relative to US Federal law specifically in regard to DNS service providers, which then don't make consistent framework sense in the balance of interests but where an arbitrator could potentially declare the contradictions inherent with such absolute clauses to be irrelevant in upholding them anyway in a given circumstance, in spite of mitigating factors against it.

However, arbitration is not the same process as whatever is going on in equivalent modern US Federal case precedent, which in part is motivated by saving judicial resources by throwing out analysis of an entire argument upon a finding for one supposed foundational defect, even if other factors favor the litigant (again, in Hague Evidence situations, particularly where there are blocking laws which should then logically favor US enforcement of deposition decisions on a US Federal tax entity counterparty to take responsibility for its overseas counterparty, at least in Judgment Creditor situations; but where such wholistic concerns are clearly not occurring consistently anymore). I can't see absolute contract frameworks which are contradicted by other contract clauses and in concepts of public good and duty of care, especially in public-private partnership-originating setups, would not be considered by arbitrators in a balance of interests test; or by State Courts for that matter depending on their frameworks for what counts as a duty of care.

It may be that requesting US-based enforcement of deposing an uncooperative overseas entity would be looked upon more favorably once an attempt is made via the Hague Convention if there's a blocking law involved. However, the fact that a blocking law exists should then simply mean there's a comity factor in favor of the requester for some sort of a US-based remedy, as far as I can conclude. Even entities which accept Hague Evidence requests denied mine without any valid excuse under Article 12, and that didn't count as a comity factor in my favor, or it was somehow seen as not enough of one to consider alternate solutions that I proposed (such as sending a judicial Letter of Request to those Central Authorities).

Hopefully in our bank entity situation, the mainland Chinese bank responds or is compelled to respond by the Supreme People's Court or a local People's Court; but again, going by China's obvious blocking laws as exemplified by a full exclusion of Hague Evidence Convention Article 23 as I cited, I'm not confident. That's what it comes down to when comity tests aren't utilized to formulate other solutions; all that remains is hope that some sort of response will occur because it won't be enforceable in any sense under such a judicial environment. This isn't a huge part of our case because it's an attempt at document deposition over discovering the identity behind a mid-point transaction related to the CEX.IO-terminating blockchain transaction (a minor part of this whole case despite all of this serving as a testbed of sorts for other action). However, it still doesn't bode well when comity tests are outright ignored from analysis. I ultimately understand why that occurred, but it still is unsettling beyond feeling upset about making a procedural mistake.

At least in a US Federal context where personal jurisdiction is not in doubt, the problem I see is in the actual strength of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 26. Discovery accuracy doesn't seem well-accommodated as a concept beyond filing another motion for discovery against a party where accuracy of established discovery materials is found to be lacking such that sanctions can be justified. This then limits punishment to Court benefits in the form of sanctions (fees) at most; not benefits for the party who brings up the issue. It also puts into question if third party data holders can then be targeted for any sort of relief beyond US entities that fail to respond or confer at all.

As a factual issue, the litigation environment around whether accurate discovery can be judicially enforced or otherwise punished also then necessarily still skirts the concept of duty of care no matter how it's viewed. The sanctions application route of enforcement further doesn't inherently address fundamental case-determining evidence such as the accuracy of Know Your Customer information which in my view in a duty of care context is an outright liability (cognizable harm if not accurately provided) because a failure to understand the customers on a service providers' part means that the customers' harms cannot be restrained at all relative to their being specifically defined by the use of a given third-party's services (third-party relative to the fundamental customer harms against given Plaintiffs relative to use of the services).

If a given discovery/disclosure issue is taken up at the US Federal interlocutory level where the data holders are still considered to be third-parties, this then amounts to asking a Court to determine the factual basis for data inaccuracy without a damages claim. This is then likely why the issue of cognizable harm or liability relative to a Federal Statute came under judicial questioning in our situations involving cryptocurrency firms and web host services. Such matters then circle back to needing to either find a relevantly applicable Federal Statute for cognizable harm under a right of private action where very few Statutes deal with KYC situations and only in regards to financial institutions, and where there is increasing hostility to US-centered enforcement procedures when data is held at non-US entity counterparties.

Only financial institutions are precisely covered in Federal Statue over KYC data at a Federal level, and international comity tests to target US bank counterparties even when data is held at a non-US counterparty really only come up in Judgment Creditor situations regarding banks. That is the whole challenge in digital asset situations relying on discovery of unknown Defendants unless the precedent is at all expanded to accommodate targeting financial institutions generally (including money transmitters) even in non-Judgment Creditor situations, which I was consistently unable to accomplish in our situation.

Again, this is all fine for what it is and I work with the US Federal judicial decisions I'm given within this context where personal jurisdiction is not straightforward, where certain comity factors can now be taken as singularly absolutely important (namely, a litigant undertaking the Hague Convention protocols without US judiciary assistance or enforcement), and where I can admittedly make procedural mistakes. However, what I can't entirely accept is when my enforcement arguments in a US Federal civil context, which have all taken place relative to very different third-party entity scenarios, are called outright 'frivolous' or labeled with other subjective qualifiers by a judiciary when I am making researched and reasoned arguments in line with balance of interest tests in regard to such very different and ultimately complex situations. I get the frustration with judicial resources being used to process such arguments in such a complex scenario where a high failure rate by some given foundational defect standard may occur due to litigants attempting to solve such issues within a Federal context, but there were indeed a number of very different third-party entity situations in our case where I put in the effort to develop arguments in each such discovery situation.

It's not as if I'm offering up arguments with absolutely no basis in case precedent and US legal principles, even though the judicial conclusion I received in itself cites precedent from other Judges deeming certain arguments to be frivolous and meritless toward deeming my arguments to be frivolous. I am in fact offering up reasons behind my arguments, as summarized in this article, using established Federal test criteria which could have very well worked for some manner of relief not long ago before continued shifts away from the Aerospatiale precedent, if some level of inquisitorial activity took place to acknowledge the issues and to allow for some minimal judicial relief or Hague Letter transmittal assistance even if my particular conceptions for relief weren't accepted, and if I weren't being absolutely punished for minor omissions of legal concepts which has been occurring ever since my having to edit and refile the Complaint multiple times at my expense. Again, where some Complaint revisions were rejected merely because I hadn't cited exactly why cryptocurrency is a commodity future in a US Federal context which other Federal private action civil cases I've reviewed haven't had to do, and in not explicitly citing right of private action clauses in relation to an asserted Federal Question where other cases haven't had to do that either. Then more recently where my not explicitly citing duty of care as a liability standard because of only citing a Statute's private right of action clause precluded any further analysis of the overall web service entity argument for any possible judicial relief, and in regard to cryptocurrency exchanges where I hadn't cited the exact authority allowing tribunals to send Letters of Request even though I have done so since then in another Application that has been completely ignored.

At some point, if a judiciary is not going to be even the slightest bit inquisitorial, there comes an intersection point where such a given judiciary's frustration with significant judicial resource use due to a high number of failed Motions on a litigant's part perhaps has to be considered as partly causing its own frustration. Further, if foundational defects are cited as a reason to preclude complete analysis of certain Motions' lines of argument, then there shouldn't have been much resource expenditure reviewing such Motions anyway.

In any event, the fact is that the current state of civil discovery enforcement in a US Federal context, especially in regards to absolutely fundamental data needs for certain cases to get anywhere at all, isn't entirely intuitive and has undergone relatively rapid changes in what is actually possible. Namely, the ability to attain disclosure of accurate KYC data which is not reliably gatherable via public law enforcement routes due to extremely limited resources provided for such activity going by FBI case solve rates alone, let alone other regions/countries, despite this being absolutely important in an ever-growing digital asset space in particular. This is a large part of why I started a US Federal District Court case to begin with, but it turns out enforcement mechanisms or Hague assistance of any sort in that context is not reliable for a variety of reasons going by recent case precedent since Aerospatiale; even in Judgment Creditor situations regarding bank assets where the most specific precedent actually exists, and even after accounting for my procedural mistakes. Especially in cryptocurrency exchange situations, I pushed right against bleeding-edge precedent and it still wasn't enough to apply to discovery enforcement of any sort; even apparently to achieve cross-judicial Hague Evidence Letter of Request transmittal assistance.

Rejection for liability of one identified and summoned Defendant given a lack of basis in direct harm (rejection for duty of care in a Federal judicial context) - 9/26/2025

Finally, in essence, the duty of care argument under anti-money laundering laws against the currently identified and summoned Defendant was rejected with prejudice because it didn't tie back to a direct harm (i.e., fraud under the Commodity Exchange Act). That means liability had to descend directly from an originating scheme against the victim in order to progress at all. If that now-former Defendant couldn't point in theory to someone else upstream of the final transaction in controversy involving CEX.IO, or didn't respond to the case at all, it could have been different because there wouldn't have been any way to point the blame onto someone else in a pseudonymous blockchain environment. It still could have been argued that the person directly benefitted from fraud and thus in essence participated in harm because of a lack of viable defense presented otherwise.

All of this generally outlines the contours of what US Federal District Court is willing to consider regarding ancillary liabilities, from both relevant third-parties regarding Know Your Customer regimes and those who come into receiving stolen funds even if not directly related to an originating tort harm, in a private civil case context. This is in spite of a right of private action and that money laundering necessarily involves people who may not understand the originating unlawful or illicit activities that rendered the assets they received or purchased as having an illicit status. Per an AML case against Deutsche Bank as outlined on [Anti Money Laundering News] in a private civil context, AML violations at a Federal banking level don't necessarily become private civil liabilities and that has been demonstrated in our case in multiple similar contexts now. It's only natural that the same would extend to a downstream Defendant not directly tied to an originating fraud harm.

That is the limitation in a modern Federal context; the contours are such that not only does a right of private action need to exist, but the form of liability has to be rooted in direct harm even when liability of some sort can be argued to exist. That means private duties of care, which is essentially what an AML regime failure is about in a private context, are unworkable in a Federal context in the current environment. Even to discover this one former Defendant ended up relying on voluntary disclosures that just happened to be accurate, especially given that personal jurisdiction did not apply because of CEX.IO's use of US DNS services not counting toward personal jurisdiction in a third-party context and that cognizable harm under a Federal Question had not been postulated in regard to KYC procedures, which extended to all of the cryptocurrency exchanges that have relevance to this case. The one former Defendant was able to dodge any Federal liabilities because of a private action case needing to adhere to a rooting in direct harm, and I'm left to trust that his pointing of blame to someone upstream will be enough for my resulting cross-border evidence request actually being processed in mainland China.

None of this is surprising at this point and I'm glad it has been judicially clarified specifically in this individual context, but it certainly is not intuitive and to me it's certainly in part about Federal Courts trying to preserve resources, including trying to keep KYC and AML enforcement in a public enforcement sphere. Which would be fine if the rate of successful enforcement was not so paltry as again evidenced by the IC3's own reporting, and that is why I started this case in the first place expecting that there would be at least SOME enforcement mechanisms in a private civil case environment to get around this lack of public law enforcement.

This is why in terms of the originating harms alleged against DNS service users, I'm also continuing to pursue arbitration from the relevant DNS service on a duty of care basis within a relevant US State's precedent. US State precedent generally is rooted in common law understandings of tort harms which can take into account non-special, non-direct relationships to determine liabilities, and this is definitely the case in that entity's principal place of business for its operations (that State's particular precedent).

Otherwise, if I can get full identification from the relevant bank around the next-immediate transaction partially identified by the former final CEX.IO account-holding Defendant regarding the cryptocurrency transaction route that terminated at CEX.IO, then I'd think it's on that person's onus to show that direct liability may lie in a preceding transaction if summoned through mainland China's mandated judicial process in the same way which transpired with the former Defendant (where the former Defendant partially identified that person in a bank transaction as part of claiming a lack of direct participation in fraud harm; that a mere bona fide purchase had taken place despite the pseudonymous nature of receiving cryptocurrency from an over-the-counter source in terms of the blockchain activity).

I will also of course be arguing that it's likely that that person is tied to the originating fraud event in directly benefitting from it, and thus that the person had a chance to understand the victim, in a way which I couldn't with the former Defendant because that person received stolen funds from a hot swap-interfacing wallet and passed it to the former Defendant within six minutes. The hot swap service-interfacing wallet was the direct receiver of funds taken from the victim's hosted wallet on the fraudulent originating website, so the controller of that wallet necessarily handled and had a chance to benefit from stolen cryptocurrency in a direct, knowing way. There's no way that that particular person, whether different or the same as the person I'm currently attempting to fully identify, did not know of the website scheme, or should have known; especially given that the cryptocurrency was passed along as part of classic layering and eventual reintroduction into a legitimate economic stream. This would also entail association with the full amount of stolen cryptocurrency and not just the portion that went to CEX.IO because the entire amount of stolen funds passed through the hot swap-interfacing wallet first. The only way for the next person I'm pursuing the full identity of to get around direct liability for direct association with such fraud and money laundering would be to then prove that the hot swap-interfacing wallet is not their own given the pseudonymous nature of blockchain technology, or so I hope the Court would consider that toward approving joinder (if and when I can even get enough information for a motion for joinder).

There's no way to determine such liability in a direct sense unless the person is summoned and provides a defense, just like the one former Defendant, although I of course won't be pushing for duty of care liability. If the person cannot point the blame at someone else upstream using enough transaction data from a financial institution or doesn't respond, then I'll argue that the only determination is that the person did participate directly in the fraud and laundering scheme to directly benefit from related harm given the closeness of the transactions and the complete lack of an ability to make any further determination due to the pseudonymous nature of blockchain activity; whether or not that person is a registrant of the originating website. An in-tandem financial transaction is the only real way I can think of to at least partially definitively identify someone in relation to an otherwise over-the-counter blockchain transaction given that cryptocurrency exchanges are what have provided a web-based interface for direct fiat-value cryptocurrency transactions in the first place.

The current Federal private civil action regime unfortunately leaves a lot up to voluntary cooperation to discover Defendants accurately, including discovering and summoning end-point recipients who then may point the blame at someone else regarding the causation of direct harm or to continue gaining more information toward finding the direct harmer while trusting that that person's information is accurate; and trusting that information from money transmitters and web host/DNS services is accurate, given that accurate discovery responses haven't been enforced in any way in terms of sanctions or otherwise in our case. This is generally the challenge as discussed in any sort of case like this. It seems any sort of response at all can let entities of any sort off the hook in terms of owing any liabilities as long as there is seemingly something to work with from a summoned Defendant pointing the direct blame elsewhere at someone who seems to be another specifically defined person, or if a company shows that it followed KYC protocols to any extent, even if any level of scrutiny shows that the data is not accurate toward fully identifying anyone from such data to allow a summons to take place at all. This applies even to bank-level KYC responsibilities; US Federal District Court has found a way to even keep banks from being directly liable to third-parties harmed by their customers even where harm cannot be plausibly corrected unless accurate KYC data is maintained and divulged for good cause. Again, because direct harm standards take such seeming priority over any concept of duty of care in a Federal judicial sense.

This is why I've had to consider arbitration per what other Federal private civil action cases I've seen ended up judicially mandating, where I'm taking a duty of care standpoint in those contexts. However, that is not a realistic avenue against non-US individuals in regards to those who benefit downstream from money laundering without having a direct special relationship with a victim. They would have to be sued as such in their home jurisdictions and I doubt mainland China has such provisions when its code of civil procedures mandates that a fraud act has to be proven as having been committed by the Defendant (burden on the Plaintiff to prove this); essentially what US Federal District Courts are doing in its precedent. I'm primarily then still referring to attempting to uphold KYC duties of care in a corporate entity context.

To me, the entire Federal atmosphere in an AML private right of action context flies in the face of common law conceptions of a duty of care. US States in their concepts of duties of care don't all directly discount violations of Federal law, and some explicitly allow consideration of such violations, as discussed in-depth at [American University, Washington College of Law]. Yet, US Federal District Courts themselves have essentially discounted the entire concept in an AML context, even though KYC procedures for financial institutions in the least and those who use various companies' services to benefit from money laundering-causing transactions that take place downstream of originating theft events by definition are not direct tort harmers. They still nevertheless benefit from other peoples' stolen funds, either as a service custodian or in direct receipt. It's definitely not intuitive that Federal private rights of action are barred from receiving this type of analysis when it is routinely considered in Federal public enforcement, but where the latter doesn't necessarily directly benefit victims unless a victim can prove original ownership of any seized funds for victim's remission after a seizure event takes place; contingent upon finding out about that event and piecing together that it may be relevant. This is a similar issue as needing to prove an individual direct economic harm when sensitive personal data is handled and misused (namely, collected without permission and then sold to other parties) as analyzed in depth at [GW Law].

However, this is why I finally took a multi-pronged approach using all avenues with the information I've been able to extract from civil discovery processes while still pushing as far as I could in a Federal liability context. I believe I'm simply hitting a wall in a Federal context which professional lawyers also go through in these complex and multi-layered problem spaces; not that the arguments have no merit in other contexts nor that an impediment of some sort isn't plainly apparent.

The reluctance for enforcement mechanisms to be deployed on a Federal private civil level for accurate discovery of such a fundamental variety, as if the discovery activity is just like any other type of evidence collection procedure, complicates all of this but I've nevertheless been pursuing alternate pathways to resolve downstream and upstream sources of potential liability to continue progressing in the matter. It seems, though, that a straight-forward method to discourage people from benefitting from money laundering and to hold companies accountable for attaining and retaining KYC data in manners that work toward directly restoring victims in US Federal private action cases will take an act of Congress or some hefty changes in US Federal District Court decisions which are centering very intently on only recognizing direct intent to harm, or in directly and knowingly benefitting from such harms in direct association. This is in spite of the fact that the entire challenge in fraud and laundering cases is discovering perpetrators and/or other beneficiaries who are specifically defined by their use of financial services (banks and money transmitters), and that thus by definition a beneficiary of stolen funds is not necessarily the direct thief. The entire act of theft and then opening such illicit supplies to others downstream is only made possible by anonymity, or effective anonymity given how much has to be gone through to attain information and/or to determine avenues for liability against data holders who should have attained and retained accurate information. This atmosphere only encourages such activity, where in our case alone I had documented finding multiple carbon copies in form and content of the website in controversy of the case.

The problem in a US context to me can then be summarized as many functions of duty of care which may be useful in the matters dogging our Federal private action case and similar ones are only truly pursuable at a US State level or arbitral level. Yet the contradiction is that any possible power of personal jurisdiction over non-US persons involved in fraud, initial laundering and downstream laundering to have a chance at discovering them and litigating the matter lies in Federal Statute (anti-money laundering) and Federal case precedent (virtual interaction with a US State forum or national forum to commit fraud via a website against residents). I effectively can't pursue downstream money launderers in the US in any context as a result because of this exact incongruity; personal jurisdiction wouldn't apply in a State context and a basis for liability doesn't exist in a Federal context. I have seen a path to transfer KYC liability controversies to other jurisdictions, but it's still rather goofy to me to have to do that when the accuracy of such data is so fundamental to identifying those accused of fraud and laundering via specific services.

Though I understand the decision to drop the now-former Defendant and had been anticipating this in total context, it certainly puts into question the total usefulness of cryptocurrency tracing services, besides the standing concerns I've outlined even with the one I found to be minimally helpful in originally formalizing evidence. That such services can't in themselves directly determine anyone's identities is what creates all of these KYC controversies to begin with in a cryptocurrency context. The most use they have is in analyzing complicated mixing and tumbling situations where many-fold transactions take place to obscure tracing any given funds to final locations because of making it difficult to trace the most-likely pathways by total amount and transaction date without software assistance, but it's all still ultimately public information that anyone can research; with an algorithm to help eliminate possibilities or by researching each potentially-relevant linked transaction individually. Some cryptocurrencies like ETH award fees to third-party computers that verify transactions in the form of a fraction of the transaction value, so mixing and tumbling logically cannot become too complicated or else a significant amount of the cryptocurrency will get eaten in fees prior to reintroduction into cryptocurrency exchanges for standardized fiat-value determinations and subsequent sale.

Narrowing of DNS and web service entity responsibilities to equitable remedies owed to specifically-defined classes in contracts and civil procedures after back-and-forth interchange - 10/12/2025

As part of arbitration with the web host and DNS entities that I found relevant to the original case, finally some counter-arguments were presented ahead of a preliminary call.

The response focused on more detailed arguments against responsibility for third-party content under Section 230 (barring Internet services from any direct or implied responsibility for published content created by third-parties), with a plethora of precedent upholding it at Federal and State levels even when website users or DNS registrants cannot be identified and even after potentially knowingly making money off of providing services to fraudsters and launders ('content neutral' even in that sense, unless direct assistance was provided to the fraudsters in direct cash aid or services aiding the fraud, or in specifically making money from the fraud). United States precedent in this type of matter primarily involves defamatory material, such as users posting harmful content on individual websites (not necessarily entire websites themselves under a DNS service's regime) and overwrites State law or other tort conceptions for the most part.

A monetary claim was only my second arbitral claim; it was primarily staked in equitable relief under ICANN's contract and relevant civil procedures around discovery supplementations. However, the response was geared toward requesting leave to dismiss the case outright over the failure of the monetary claim to meet the burden of overcoming Section 230.

As a result, even though it largely turned out to be a distraction, I reviewed all of the precedent cited in response and it yielded a straight-forward ultimate conclusion which I communicated. Certain precedent has specifically allowed contractual points which confer benefits to specifically defined classes from exemption from Section 230 in a very narrow sense (effectively, when the contract essentially entails an offer or promise due to specifically defining a responsibility to a specifically-cited class; not merely a general policy). I had already cited ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement section 3.7.8 for 'any person' being able to inquire about a data inaccuracy issue with the contact information of a hosted registrant, and that the responsible registrar should be able to take reasonable steps to make a correction, but hadn't tied it to that precedent. I had also cited relevant civil procedure rules (namely, Arizona's Rule 26(g) which I found relevant based on where relevant entities are registered) for the right of parties that have served a discovery request to expect a timely response if a receiving party is made aware of a discovery deficiency; where I had issued and domesticated a subpoena for good cause around the production of specific non-privileged customer information and then pointed out detailed accuracy concerns myself from the original response. These responsibilities are then not based in a concept of direct harm, and equitable remedies as described are valid because they are owed to such specific classes. Achieving such remedies may ultimately require the threat of Court sanctions (injunction) to obtain such supplementary or corrective responses, but such an injunction is not predicated upon harm by third parties (neither do the fees imposed toward enforcing a response even benefit the moving party). Those sources specifically define which classes are supposed to benefit from such equitable relief within the relevant clauses.

This of course doesn't mean that a responding entity will end up ever eventually producing completely accurate data. However, between the two standards, it should provide a regime for specific responses from DNS services to specific supplement-requiring parties. Even if data cannot be maximally corrected to the state it should be according to general contractual standards or other standards, the response should be able to include a reasonable description of why the information could not be fully corrected given that reasonable techniques have to be employed to correct such data and to verify it in the first place. So far, I simply have no such response after sending a subpoena for good cause to the WhoIs identity-obscuring entity. I had the logic for equitable relief laid out already as it applies to a specifically named class, including the RAA section 3.7.8, but it needed to be tied to relevant precedent for a narrow standard for expected equitable relief that did not have to do with direct harm or responsibility for third-party content under Section 230. An arbitrator could very well set a schedule as needed toward resolving such matters and if responses are not provided, or if there are still reasonably valid issues with responses, an arbitrator could recommend sanctions to enforce a response for a Claimant to pursue in the relevant State Court system.

Third-party counsel for the Respondent companies that I found relevant, as part of their response, had countered in particular that only one entity that hadn't been named as a party was the only valid 'accredited registrar' entity with ICANN. However, that is easily amended if needed when the entity has the same statutory agent as the others, is within the same ownership structure, is within the same branding and clearly has the same staff involved. Notice by email has been accepted by AAA-ICDR already for the other entity parties and a representative lawyer of the companies has been on the emails, besides the hired third-party counsel. Further, the counsel also questioned why the direct victim wasn't a party but it's because he doesn't want to directly deal with the matter. I've now clarified and perfected an equitable remedy claim which isn't based in direct harm or Section 230 anyway, and I'm the one making the data and discovery requests so I don't see how it's relevant, but I'd be fine to agree joining him as a party if needed.

This was all argued by the third-party counsel toward asking for leave to dismiss the entire action; which I think is extremely premature given that the data accuracy issue was never addressed, that only the secondary claim for monetary damages was argued against and that their act of finally providing counter-arguments only now finally made me conceptualize a narrow argument in favor of equitable relief that trumps Section 230 within the narrow contractual precedent that I found. I did not consider the possibility of potential enforcement of relief via sanctions pressure before, but a non-response for equitable relief or an inadequate response implies that an eventual threat of sanctions to enforce a response is the only way forward in such situations. US Federal District Courts don't necessarily want to get involved because of expecting it to be resolved in the Meet and Confer process and being biased toward situations involving direct harm within a Federal Statute context, but if it doesn't work out then State standards or other contractual tort standards have to apply. Where an appropriate State Court should be able to enforce adequate responses via threat of sanctions if needed, but I again went the arbitration route in the first place exactly to induce this interplay of argument and counter-argument to narrow and contour the discovery issue, and if needed to have an arbitrator set a discovery schedule.

Though this precludes private enforcement of general Know Your Customer standards where all such plausible standards I know of do not explicitly confer benefits to specific private classes such that direct harm has to be shown under the standards in any context regarding Section 230, it does mean that supplemental responses and corrections in the context in the specifically defined class situations that I described, even if they are unable to achieve complete corrective accuracy, should be able to describe the reasonable steps taken to correct such customer contact data to exhaust the issue (registrant data in this context). That should mean potential eventual sanctions threats by a relevant Court to enforce a response at all or where a response is still seen as inadequate then still doesn't have to do with predicating a third-party harm (exact website content) to a web host or DNS service within that context. Injunctive relief that still predicates such harm (relies on a basis of a duty over third-party content because of a lack of a specifically defined duty to any specific class of people) is what also fails against Section 230 in most Federal and State contexts. This is again in tandem with US Federal District Court generally not accepting arguments for duty of care or other liabilities not having to do with direct harm to begin with, but Section 230 situations expand the context to State law as well.

I ultimately still don't have a corrective response from the WhoIs identity-obscuring service in the family of companies, which at least applies to the civil procedure standards so I don't see how it can be invalidated as a relevant party to arbitration. However, again, I'm fine to summon the other entity claimed as being solely responsible for registrant data even though the obscuration service necessarily used such data and the legal team had access to it because it was the web host's legal team which responded to me. Then I find that if we still can't reach agreement, the arbitrator can assign a discovery schedule which could then in theory turn into a recommendation for sanctions to take to State Court if there is no participation, or inadequate participation (i.e., if there are still data accuracy issues that could still be plausibly reasonably corrected).

There are clearly additional reasonable steps that can be done to move towards correcting the data inaccuracies even though I can't directly enforce consequences if the data ends up being permanently inaccurate anyway after the reasons for such inadequacy and the steps taken to correct it are described. My continual minimal suggestion that has always gone without comment has been to cross-check with payer data in particular (i.e., customer-provided bank information from payments). I have also not seen an argument even attempting to attack the validity of asserting a data inaccuracy issue or the factual basis of the asserted inaccuracy even though the primary claim has been based on equitable relief over attaining discovery supplementation; same way I've been dealing with all of these types of data holder situations.

Continued discussion on narrow applicability for responsibilities of Internet service companies to the public in spite of 47 U.S.C. Section 230; finally reaching filed status on a Cayman Islands Writ regarding Binance - 11/9/2025

As part of arbitration with the DNS service companies, finally counter-arguments were actually offered by third-party counsel in October 2025 and they were sensible arguments. Secondary money claims could be put to rest because of predication on third-party harms per case precedent that affirmed sweeping protections under 47 U.S.C. Section 230 (including State tort claims such as negligence of a duty of care). That meant implied private rights of action to enforce Know Your Customer regimes were agreed as inapplicable.

However, as described previously, this said nothing about contractual offers to specifically defined beneficiaries via contract. This is one of the few means by which relief can be afforded in recent precedent, at least according to decisions in some major California State cases. That then relevantly applies precisely to Internet service companies via ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement # 3.7.8 for 'any person' who brings a data inaccuracy claim creating a requirement for a registrar subject to such a claim to reasonably fix WhoIs data related to hosted customers, and to employ reasonable verification techniques toward such action. In essence, a contractual duty to the public where the predication for such a duty is based upon who is authoritatively named as a beneficiary. Now I've further realized that the data which had to be procured via a domesticated subpoena meant that the subpoena was also issued and sent in the public interest, especially when proxy services who buy registrar services from an accredited registrar have to follow the same provisions in ICANN's contract (ICANN RAA # 3.12.2 where all 'reseller' agreements have to include ICANN's provisions). The domesticated subpoena went to a related entity of the accredited registrar acting as a proxy service; there necessarily should be a reseller agreement where ICANN's provisions are included.

Sweeping Section 230 protections were still claimed anyway in further discussion even after I reviewed the original counter-arguments and brought up basic contractual duties under ICANN which are not reliant on third-party harms (nothing to do with implying that a DNS service acts as the publisher of objectionable information or website mechanisms to predicate relief on negligence). There was also suddenly an assertion tacked on that equitable-only relief can't count as a 'claim' in itself or be pursued in arbitration, which I find to be a non-starter because it doesn't make procedural sense at all. This type of matter isn't ideal as an arbitrable dispute because at most, it would entail an arbitrator's recommendation for the validity of equitable relief to support a subsequent Court application versus simply going to a relevant Court to begin with, but it's obvious looking at any Court system that making applications for equitable relief where money damages are unwarranted or not conductive to restoration is clearly allowed. Including intense conflict over attaining information about bank accounts in judgment debtor situations and other equitable matters in spite of the third-party status of such entities relative to underlying harm caused by customers.

Data about customers in controversy of a DNS service may not be perfectly repairable or providable, but ICANN's provisions to me indicate that a reasonable effort at repairing the data or explaining why accuracy cannot be further improved should be done, per the relevant clauses. Yet all I was offered was for the Chinese character version of the most-complete address to be provided, but I already did that much work myself and I can't do more because I wouldn't have access to privileged financial transaction data that may provide further clarity on identification. Alongside intimidation tactics pushed on me akin to what Binance did in asserting that the only offer while claiming that complete triumph will be had.

This isn't surprising and I don't necessarily blame third-party counsel for pushing out such a message, but I do find that equitable relief of this variety will increasingly feature in more cases and spin-off cases with underlying harm caused by fraudsters unless law enforcement becomes more effective at dealing with such situations to extract KYC data on mass scales. The only mechanism I can see in regards to gaining as extensive of customer information as possible from DNS services in the United States via civil mechanisms otherwise is to utilize ICANN's contract where there are clear duties to the public based on the fact that WhoIs data is supposed to be public by default. This goes back to ICANN's origin as a public-private partnership to prevent the need for Statutory intervention over Internet governance.

In this instance, it was ultimately the DNS service companies who accepted arbitration where I had an initial arbitral case filed as a backdrop while still offering to negotiate the factual issues because repeat attempts to negotiate via voluntary messages alone were not working. None of this also precludes submitting applications to the relevant Court system during or after arbitration, where the subpoena had been domesticated into the jurisdiction of the principal places of business of the companies.

I also updated the Writ regarding the Binance case in the Cayman Islands to account for lessons learned from this entire DNS services dispute. I.e., I explicitly defined that the secondary monetary claim is based on an implied right of action over the Cayman Islands' anti-money laundering laws (its KYC requirements for financial institutions, including money transmitters with a scope that further includes virtual asset transaction activity). This is then an implicit admission that that claim may not go through but that equitable relief is primarily sought (Norwich relief) where I haven't been able to achieve issuance of a cross-judicial Letter of Request or to be taken seriously when I submitted a Hague Model Form directly to the Clerk of Court's office. The monetary claim was reduced to the Statutory minimum even though the loss of the victim to third-party harms is greater than that because I didn't want to keep debating the ad valorem fee issue over and over with the Civil Registry, where it continually decided not to clarify further even though I found the calculation to be problematic and where I had no idea if the Category 1 vs. Category 2 wire receipt issue had been fixed. I still had to put in another email because the documents were sitting in 'submitted' status, but the updated Writ finally reached 'filed' status after that. That means there's plenty of money via wire transfers to handle any actions that cost additional filing fees. Now I probably need to put in another Bailiff service of process request regarding the updated documents, which should be deliverable now that a Writ is on file.

Reconsideration of how to interpret the contractual status of DNS proxy services and responsibility over unpublished underlying domain licensee identifiable information - 11/18/2025

Thinking about the entire state of arbitration with the proxy DNS service in controversy and the entity named on the web host website for the related 'non-public' WhoIs request form, relative to how immediately published WhoIs data that is under a proxy mask is formatted and which specific entities are defined in key clauses of ICANN's RAA, a few different approaches on how to interpret what counts as 'WhoIs' data have to be considered. I've been contemplating that as part of writing a formal response document even before looking at any of Respondents' third party counsel's formal filing which was due yesterday in the Scheduling Order.

Duties to the public to maintain WhoIs accuracy under RAA # 3.7.8 specifically define it as the registrar's duty (thus, the accredited registrar). In RAA # 3.12.2 and 3.12.4, a re-buyer of registrar services from registrars and thus which have to abide by the RAA provisions as part of any reseller agreement can include proxy services, but proxy services are not explicitly defined automatically as having that status. Proxy services under 3.12.4 have to deposit customer information (licensee identifiable data) with the registrar, but it's only defined this way in the reseller agreement clauses (in relation to resellers offering proxy services to potential domain licensees).

It has to be considered that licensee data (proxy-masked data) does not necessarily count as WhoIs data at all. It should de facto count and thus be reasonably accessible by the public anyway by some sort of access form under ICANN's clear intention for the public to be able to scrutinize domain holder data as intended, even if use agreements are necessary to prevent spam/harassment to split the difference with privacy rights. However, it could also be interpreted that if a registrar merely lists the registrant as a proxy service or as some other type of licensor, then that's all the WhoIs data it is responsible for and thus that proxied licensee data doesn't count as 'WhoIs' in any way. This smacks of circular logic which causes no entity in such circumstances to have any actual substantively-intended duties under RAA # 3.8.7, but it is a possible conclusion that has to be taken into account. The duty would apply in relation to the proxy service anyway if it is assumed to be the re-buyer of registrar service such that it counts as the registrar owing the duty in such a clause, but this is not a solid interpretation because this is only implied by the re-seller agreement absent evidence of a specific agreement with the registrar.

The only contractual clause under such circumstances which then definitively specifically defines the existence of duties under certain circumstances, who owes the duty and whom is owed such a duty comes down to RAA # 3.7.7.3. The specifically defined entity that owes liability if a licensee cannot be identified after causing harm is the registered domain holder. This necessarily means the registrant on immediate record in published WhoIs data; either current or historical data as relevant, and thus it can include an explicit proxy service or some other entity that licenses out domain use under the registrar. That is, the registrar is not defined as responsible in that clause. The persons owed a duty are not the general public in this clause, but rather a party who brings evidence of actionable harm caused by a domain licensed out under these circumstances. The duty is then for the registrant to provide the contact information and the identity of the licensees or accept liability for the harm.

This is significant because liability for harm under a contractual clause with such specifically defined terms could then overcome Section 230 protections in a straightforward manner without the widely-interpretable implications of RAA # 3.7.8 getting in the way (how to define 'reasonable' accuracy improvements of WhoIs data and without any guarantee of 100% accuracy; only that a data inaccuracy claimant can expect reasonable work to improve accuracy under reasonable verification techniques). All of the cases cited by Respondents in this particular arbitral case have featured implied negligence claims or claims which name an incorrect entity from a contractual clause for a benefit (again, e.g., registrar instead of registrant). However, if this clause is cited towards appropriately targeting an intended entity for liability with evidence provided of wrongdoing, RAA # 3.7.7.3 essentially indicates that 100% identifiable accuracy of licensees should be provided or else liability for harm applies.

I am the one who brought forward evidence of wrongdoing over domains in controversy in this case even though I'm not the exact person who interacted with websites in controversy (impact to family finances, regardless). Both contact information and identification have to be provided by the registrant to meet that clause, where I received contact information of a sort in discovery materials from the proxy service, but there is no accurate information in the material to interpret any of it as encompassing verified identities, as described before (one domain with an address I could reconstruct but the name didn't match the Hong Kong Land Registry as expected; second domain customer information entailed complete nonsense data).

Besides the proxy service, because I had named the other Respondent as the operator on the host company website instead of as the accredited registrar (still a related entity anyway), of course Respondents' third-party counsel has been calling that out as entailing a lack of a relevant named entity from which to pursue WhoIs-related equitable relief at all. Besides claiming that Section 230 bars any form of relief and especially injunctively-enforceable relief, even after I called out the existence of clear judicially-supportable carve-outs for contractual clauses that are specific enough to act as intended promises or offers even within cases cited at me amidst the many bases for relief that such cases discounted. But this is exactly what got me thinking further about the nature of WhoIs data and how proxied licensee data may not be interpretable as, or not exclusively interpretable as, unpublished WhoIs data. This then led to the realization of proxy services as being most specifically definable as registrants in relation to registrars via the plainly published WhoIs data.

I'll still include the equitable relief arguments, but in full context they rely on treating the related accredited registrar entity as a de facto party since I didn't include it outright in the arbitral filing; or to interpret the proxy service as a re-buyer of registrar services by default. Further, that either way in masked data circumstances, proxied licensee data has to be interpreted as WhoIs data even if in unpublished form to interpret any substantive responsibility under RAA # 3.7.8. But realizing how RAA # 3.7.7.3 can actually apply has been a big revelation, even though pushing for money damages over liability from harm still isn't preferable to me as compared to fully learning the identities of direct tort-harming domain licensees.

Evaluation in further depth of content neutrality regarding minimal contractual duties of registrars and of registrants acting as proxy services - 11/22/2025

I still haven't gotten into reading any counter-responses by third-party counsel for the proxy domain service in controversy in the arbitral case related to the overall controversy outlined in this article, but because 47 U.S.C. Section 230 has such a massive protective footprint in the United States, I wanted to analyze elements of ICANN's RAA contract again relative to content neutrality.

As outlined before, ICANN's RAA # 3.7.8 entails clear duties to the public in maintaining certain data. In clarification, 'WhoIs' data as published includes both publishing the registrar and the registrant (the registered domain holder). The problem surrounding duties in this clause has to do with accurate registrant data.

In a plain reading of that contractual clause, only data as described in RAA # 3.3.1 has to be maintained for the public benefit (query-able or otherwise accessible) and is subject to data inaccuracy claims by 'any person,' entailing a duty to reasonably fix the accuracy issues with reasonable verification techniques. This then assumes a registrar is only responsible for the identifying information of a registrant acting as a proxy service if such an entity is employed as a registrant instead of as an end-user, which is a tautology relative to ICANN's clear intention for end-user domain identities to be obtainable and scrutinize-able.

Regardless, what duty (reasonable effort towards correcting inaccurate registrant data), who owes duties (registrars) and whom is owed the duty (data inaccuracy claimants) are all defined. It is then a content-neutral duty (irrespective of underlying reasons related to domain content) and so isn't mired in a content moderation basis; it's based on upholding contractual standards for honest dealings in commercial activity (ability to find and contact domain holders) even though specifically defined intended beneficiaries can move to uphold such duties for specific domains. It's nevertheless a content-neutral upholding of such standards by those intended to make such claims.

The problem then is that substantive, obvious intentions under the clause fall apart exactly whenever the actual end-use of the domain is licensed out by the registrant on public file. In a strict reading of ICANN # 3.12 where such a registrant is not necessarily taken to be a re-buyer of registrar services automatically (re-buyers can be proxy services but this isn't specifically definable without evidence of an explicit agreement) and where licensee data is then not taken to be 'hidden' registrant data (normally would be public if not for the masking agent), ICANN # 3.7.7.3 has to be taken as most applicable as described before (covers registrants acting as licensors).

However, the broad 'acceptance of liability' aspect of that clause (the 'what') is not specifically defined in the same way as the 'who' and the 'whom.' Money damages then would potentially run afoul of 47 U.S.C. Section 230 anyway because they would be reliant upon harmful third-party content. There is then no other interpretation other than that the clause minimally entails a duty of such a registrant to fully repair inaccurate licensee identities by whatever means, or else a registrar could completely subvert duties for public access of data and for data scrutiny regarding domain end-users (the clear contractual intent) by having a registrant acting as a proxy service off-load use of the domain to out-of-scope licensees. Minimally interpreting 'acceptance of liability' as an ongoing duty to provide an accurate identity would stay in line with content neutrality and escape this clearly exploitable technicality around types of entities. Minimally expected contractual tasks to be performed would still not be reliant upon third-party harms even though the persons who can bring liability claims under that clause are those that prove wrongful domain use (actionable harm) via reasonable evidence (more narrow than 'any person' under RAA # 3.7.8, but where a content-neutral owed duty could still be found to exist because liability is more loosely defined in RAA # 3.7.7.3).

I decided to expansively re-evaluate a minimal specifically defined contractual duty that supersedes Section 230 protections exactly because contractual clauses can still fail to supersede it, as alluded to before (where an internet service company cannot be treated as the publisher of third-party content for any liabilities). Previously I only described it in terms of 'general standards' within internal Terms of Service failing to meet this standard but more generally, it has to do with disagreements based in content moderation versus in specifically defined intended persons enforcing duties around maintaining honesty in commercial activities.

Specific promises made by corporate officers have also failed to overcome Section 230 besides general contractual standards that don't define specific beneficiaries, but ICANN's relevant contractual clauses represent an ongoing specifically defined set of duties. ICANN's provisions around allowing specifically defined person holding certain intended entities to account over accurate identification of domain end-users then involves a uniform standard in the public interest that is not reliant upon any particular published domain content. It's reliant upon duties around data which registrars and registrants are responsible for and no more, regardless of any intended person's reasons to push for accuracy over any specific domains. There is no implied basis in duty of care toward upholding such standards because who is intended to be able to uphold them in specific circumstances is contractually defined. This further relates back to ICANN's basis in a public-private partnership as part of a non-Statutory form of Internet governance.

The conclusion then is that even if a contractual clause which explicitly defines the who, what and whom broadly allows for a wide range of possible relief and defines the intended beneficiary (the 'whom') relative to harm caused by third-party content, enforcement of potential content neutral relief should be minimally possible anyway under 47 U.S.C. Section 230 (namely, ongoing liability to work towards fully identifying customers where the content host can fully choose how well to identify customers before taking them on to prevent possible later data inaccuracy claims). This echoes back to arguments I already outlined before, but with the backing of specifically defined contractual clauses and civil procedures (correction of discovery materials for a subpoena sender) for ongoing duties instead of reliance upon general standards alone.

Contemplation of what maximum possible equitable relief in the form of identification of customers might reasonably look like in relevantly-invoked contractual clauses as well as in scenarios invoking Norwich relief - 11/26/2025

The aspect of this article's side-issue over an Internet service company has featured strongly now because of my finally realizing the significance of 47 U.S.C. Section 230 regarding the barring of all relief that is predicated upon third-party harm (pursuing equitable relief from such a company domiciled in the United States). I updated my arguments as such for the existence of specifically defined duties even in spite of those protections, but the extent of what exactly is possible even for equitable relief on contractual terms is still uncertain (specific duties owed to specifically defined persons who can invoke the duties).

Regarding multiple cases overviewed by [Georgetown Journal], the primary issue featured even in contractual responsibility cases has to do with whether the responsibilities come from general Terms of Service clauses or factors that can be described as duties central to upholding honesty in commercial dealings. Even specific promises by corporate officers in that context can be stricken down because of a basis in dealing with third-party content, such as a promise to remove certain content (not published by the platform directly where the platforms did not directly participate in or actively benefit from the customer activity). Such situations are then at risk of being seen solely as content moderation disputes.

This is why in my argument for responsibility over customer data, I pivoted to specifically defined contractual responsibilities under an overarching contract that exists to provide a governance structure over registrars and registrants towards defining their responsibilities to the public; where ICANN itself came into existence as a public-private partnership in place of Statutory regulation. In that sense, I find ICANN's RAA # 3.7.8 and # 3.7.7.3 that can be invoked by specifically defined persons are relevant at least for equitable relief when centered around the customer data itself (with # 3.7.7.6 defining that registrants have to collect 'Personal Data' in the same way as registrars when they act as licensee; similar to # 3.3.1 regarding what contact data registrars have to publish about registrants). The contract both defines what customer data has to be collected and who can invoke duties over the data, including liability over full identification in # 3.7.7.3. I find relief then can be tailored in a way which is neutral in regard to third-party content regardless of the basis for invoking the duty over identifying such customers or repairing related data, where # 3.7.7.3 specifically confers beneficiary status to a party who brings evidence of actionable harm. Multiple different Federal and State cases have denied the ability of Courts to enforce equitable relief via injunction against Internet service companies, but all the ones I've reviewed have had to do with Plaintiffs claiming implied beneficiary status over negligence (focus on a remedy to correct the third-party harm).

The question then is how far equitable relief should proceed that focuses exclusively around attaining customer identifiable data under the business control of a registrar or registrant, assuming that specifically defined contractual duties are upheld in some manner that supersedes Section 230 (all the clauses listed answer who, whom, and what). If information is provided and it simply doesn't reasonably comprise of an 'identity' due to not holding any verifiability in public sources (such as cross-checking a relevant land registry), there's no choice in my view except to conclude that the data does not fulfill the duty to identify. That is the entire arbitral controversy with the Internet service company involved in this article's overall concerns because I never received a corrective reply of any sort (specifically, a registrant acting as a proxy service, whereas I had been describing it merely as a DNS service before). Minimally, I can't see how recommendations in arbitration for a discovery/disclosure schedule for correcting data using internal research materials (e.g., customer financial data) which is under the obvious control of such a company could not be utilized towards actually meeting the invoked contractual duties. Or, if even that somehow doesn't yield an actual identity, that a reasonably detailed explanation should be provided for the failure.

I've suggested all of this ever since I sent a domesticated subpoena concerning the situation that received one productive response (implicit acknowledgment of the validity of the subpoena and its jurisdiction), but no factual response since. Just arguments from third-party counsel in arbitration attacking the existence of any duties at all because of Section 230 despite clear possibilities for carve-outs in contracts, where I find that ensuring that customers are identifiable to the highest extent possible is critical for upholding honesty in commercial dealings across Internet domains (baseline contractual standard that should be getting followed anyway). The counter-arguments have included attacks on whether I'm a valid party to bring the claim instead of the direct victim despite an impact to overall family finances (the wording of ICANN's relevant contractual clauses doesn't care about that anyway; and I also was co-granted leave to send a subpoena). Further, they have also gone along the lines of how a 'claim' somehow can't solely consist of pursuing an equitable remedy, which is contradicted by the very historic melding of courts of equity and courts of law in England; even if such claims may be more effectively described as 'applications' in that sense. Still, the point of bringing such a claim is to hopefully reach factual agreement on a resolution instead of an injunctively-enforced mechanism needing to be implemented.

All of this segues into how Norwich relief might regard a similar scenario involving companies domiciled in British Commonwealth-adjacent jurisdictions, where that is exactly what I'm facing with Binance and the entire shift to the Cayman Islands as a jurisdiction (the founding entity is still there; was the only primary entity during events in controversy; an agreement in US Federal District Court involved not allowing the primary entity's anti-money laundering responsibilities to be divided out to subsidiaries or to be broken in any other way upon re-sale or restructuring). That is, as described before, I'm still seeking to identify the end-recipients of the victim's cryptocurrency at Binance.com as well (not only the licensees of the website in controversy), which meets the criteria for Norwich relief as far as I can conclude (third-parties mixed up in the activities of the information target; evidence of wrongdoing; expectation of the information target having identifiable information or reasonable access; no other discernible way to identify the accused wrongdoers).

The entire point of such relief is to provide an equitable remedy around identifying those accused of involvement in wrongdoing even if personal liability over harm by the entities they are mixed up in cannot be established. By definition in the original judicial decision which led to the establishment of Norwich-style relief being enforceable by a special injunction of the same name, this entails the information target providing the identities of those suspected of wrongdoing [Bennett Jones]. To me, this means liability for equitable relief is focused solely on ensuring provision of information under the control of the target; not on the third-party activities themselves even though the cause of action has to involve showing third-party harm. In this analysis, I have to conclude it is then third-party content-neutral or third-party activity-neutral relief; similar to what I conclude about ICANN's RAA # 3.7.8 and a minimal equitable reading of RAA # 3.7.7.3.

If identifiable information provided by such an information target is inaccurate, the question remains as to what else can be done in such a scenario (how far the factual issues should extend after establishment of a Norwich disclosure duty). So far in this article's circumstances, Binance has simply provided nothing after my sending a US subpoena and attempting arbitration (only recently has a domesticated case even begun to start after the hurdles I documented). An identification inaccuracy scenario has to be considered because that could very well occur given Binance's known anti-money laundering lapses.

The customers in such a scenario are specifically defined by their use of an information target's services and so they can only be identified that way. This again to me has to entail a Norwich order including provisions for reasonable actions to ensure accuracy (further research of internal records as necessary which an information seeker can't access), especially if the information target is in an industry with anti-money laundering standards requiring the acquisition and retention of customer identification in the first place. Inaccurate identifiable information again doesn't reasonably entail meeting the definition of an 'identity' when the data fails verification via public sources. This could still involve the same issue of how intrusive such relief should become and what the limits are for exhausting compliance. The minimum outcome to me should then involve a reasonable explanation for the party invoking the duty as to why the third-party customers cannot be completely identified.

The previously-cited article describes Norwich duties as treating an information target for the identities of mixed-up third parties as more than a mere witness. This is also an apt description for the treatment of registrars and registrants in ICANN's RAA contractual context regarding clauses covering the exact same topic where the United States otherwise has no clear Statutory regulations around Internet service companies, aside from Federal and State duties in civil procedural rules for general accuracy in discovery materials. Even when self-contained to such duties being invoked without reference to the third-party content or activities of customers, I don't see how a failure to disclose identities or how providing information which does not amount to actual identification compared to public sources without any corrective effort or explanation represents honesty in commercial dealings. It promotes the propensity for irrecoverable harm by third-parties, but even in a baseline first-party sense, it is dishonest to never provide customer or end-user identification in spite of a valid invocation of such a duty, or to flatly pass off information as if it represents an identity when it really doesn't amount to one.

Rejection by Supreme People's Court in Mainland China for processing evidence request against a relevant bank when such a request is submitted by Plaintiffs or even attorneys; squeeze between USA's cross-border evidence collection stance – 12/25/2025

At some point on or after October 17th, 2025 (reported as October 17th by ILCC.online but I didn't see an update in November that I recall), the Supreme People's Court rejected processing the evidence request for deposing a bank toward identifying the person next up in the blockchain transaction from the CEX.IO hosted wallet final transaction regarding that particular transaction chain. This wasn't unexpected, but it still highlights that these countries and regions are taking very strict interpretations of Hague Evidence Convention Article 1 (only Contracting States meant to submit Requests, even though the USA's HCCH.net page allows attorneys or other Court-allowed persons to send Requests).

This leaves a real dilemma on what can be done in such circumstances because as I outlined, my previous request for the issuance and transmittal of Letters of Request regarding the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong was never considered, even though I had relevantly cited 28 U.S. Code § 1781(b)(2) for such a possibility by the point of putting together an application that took specifically defined authorities into account for such action. I then don't have much faith in putting together another application; I've left it as a status report for now as to what occurred. Maybe I'll consider an application once I have status reports or motions to submit on other matters. The squeeze between different judicial systems' expectations is very real, especially because I was explicitly found 'frivolous' for trying to target the US counterparties of the bank anyway for enforced deposition (separate entity issue despite precedent for this in regard to banks at least in judgment creditor situations). It may not have been possible under FRCP Rule 37(2) anyway on further review (non-parties (third-parties) for deposition have to be pursued in the jurisdictions where evidence is to be taken).

I find it's still necessary to pursue any and all angles even though a few other possibilities are in progress because this is currently the straightest shot towards eventually understanding the person who managed the wallet acting as a currency hot swap (most immediate over-the-counter wallet where the victim's stolen cryptocurrency was taken). Whoever operated that wallet would be most provably related to harm while also being specifically defined by blockchain activity versus website activity (if different from the website operators). The person who is the subject of this attempt at identification via bank records is one step away from that wallet (received and transferred cryptocurrency from it within six minutes). In a purely blockchain sense, I then still find that if that receiver of funds can't identify the next person up the chain, that that receiver has direct responsibility for the preceding over-the-counter wallet acting as a hot swap interface as well (no other conclusion in a pseudonymous transaction chain context). However, that mid-point receiver has to be fully identified and summoned to get anywhere.

There's no seeming way to directly litigate this kind of matter within mainland China that I can see (either as a cognizable harm or as a duty in a private right of action context) because both its stance on Hague Evidence Convention Articles 10 and 23 and its data privacy protection laws essentially mandate that 'competent authorities' review cross-border information disclosure requests, where foreign Courts or foreign law enforcement bodies make the requests. A direct civil case or application would still ultimately be for the benefit of a foreign-originating case in this context, and there is an ongoing problem of US IP addresses being geo-blocked from most mainland legal resources and case filing systems. This makes the matter even more specifically defined than the other FRCP Rule 45 situations to justify a request for evidence collection assistance via a cross-judicial Letter of Request; there are at least identifiable pathways to filing directly for relief in those jurisdictions but I ultimately only found the Cayman Islands situation to be worthwhile attempting to deal with. Otherwise, the situations are similar in that voluntary cooperation was attempted in some way already with information targets, that enforcement of productive responses via an originating jurisdiction has not possible or is plainly not going to be possible, and that the Central Authorities have indicated for the contracting state to send requests (i.e., the presiding Judge of a particular case). Even so, again, I don't have much faith that an application for a Letter of Request to be issued and transmitted will be processed even with a specifically defined basis in US law having been pointed out given the lack of attention on the previous application regarding those other jurisdictions when I had finally identified and cited a specifically defined basis for such a request, and had provided draft Letter forms in line with the Department of State's Letter Rogatory format.

Consideration of implications in acting as an interested co-Plaintiff due to harms against family assets despite not being the direct victim of the fraud scheme - 12/28/2025

Throughout the originating action in US Federal District Court where I am a co-Plaintiff, I never considered the implications of merely 'representing' a party versus being an interested party with equal interest in a given case. In this situation, if it wasn't obvious, I'm directly legally related to the person who was directly victimized. I always simply assumed that I could help to take legal action in such a situation as a result due to common interests. The legitimacy of this set-up has not been questioned by that Court, by the one former Defendant who was able to be summoned by that point or by mainland China's judiciary in their decisions when I've utilized Hague Convention protocols. In that sense, in hindsight, I have to say that I am acting as an equally-interested party and not someone who filed on behalf of someone else in any real way because of my equal interest in family financial health and legal relationship.

Even though I was not the direct victim in the originating case, because family finances ultimately were harmed where I then have just as much of an interest in recovery as the person who was directly victimized by the fraud scheme due to being the family heir, I can't see how I would be a mere representative of that someone else. The subject matter of interest (harm to family finances) and the fraud event of interest that caused the harm are exactly the same for both myself and the direct victim. It isn't a circumstance of Plaintiffs involved in different harm events but with similar subject matter accusations against certain Defendants banding together. I made sure to include the direct victim anyway in signing the originating Complaint (in every single revision and re-filing I had to do) and informing him of what I've been doing since then given that we are co-interested Plaintiffs in the exact same issue over harms to family finances in this conception of describing the situation. I have been intimately involved the whole way in evidence collection (including costs to professionalize certain evidence as a double-check), in access to the victim's financial and cryptocurrency accounts for account information compilation, in original non-judicial outreach to corporations that are third-parties relative to the originating cause of action, and in payment of filing fees and mailing costs in case actions. Ideally, the direct victim's financial account would be directly restored but ultimately, the recovery controversy is about family assets and resulting common impact to the family.

However, because I have started alternate actions by now by myself over what I found to be inadequate or complete non-responses regarding subpoenas that I sent as part of the case (jurisdiction changes to handle discovery controversies against corporations on a first-party basis in their principal places of business), after thinking about procedural arguments I've seen in arbitration, I find that I should consider those implications in more detail. It is a potential problem of my own making to have put myself down as the sole party even though I find it could be simply corrected by adding the direct victim as a party in those alternate actions with amendments to respective Complaints/Claims if truly needed. Yet, simultaneously, it doesn't make sense to me that moving every exactly co-interested Plaintiff into other jurisdictions over spin-off matters should be required in such particular circumstances. I'm acting in the direct interest of family assets (equal legal interest in recovery in the same way as the direct victim due to the legal relationship), and am the one who brought evidence of actionable harm which matches who is allowed to invoke duties under certain of ICANN's RAA clauses and Norwich standards (colorable claim which I am related to has been expounded). Some level of liability for my benefit and thus for the overall state of recovery for family assets is then owed to me as far as I can see without reliance on the direct victim.

On its face, it's a weak procedural argument to me to say that I'm illegitimately dealing with those particular equitable issues by myself, especially because the version of that argument I initially saw in arbitration with the web host/DNS companies' third-party counsel merely left it at 'direct victim is a non-party' without tackling the legal relationship implications and obvious common family financial interests in any detail. I am also the one who sent the subpoena in the originating case anyway as someone granted leave to do so, and Arizona's civil rules contain specifically defined duties to subpoena senders. No such argument even featured at all in the pre-arbitral arguments with Binance leading up to pausing that case because of the massive fee deposits demanded by HKIAC before I finally started seriously turning the situation into a Cayman Islands legal case.

Still, this doesn't mean that such an argument couldn't continue to surface in those contexts even though I've made clear reference in those filing circumstances to the originating US Federal District Court case where the direct victim is included as a formal party, and even though I've clearly been co-granted leave to send subpoenas by the originating jurisdiction. Adding an interested party to a case later on is most complicated in a Cayman context within the conceivable situations I'd be dealing with, if it even seriously comes up there at all regarding Binance, given that each formal party has to be associated with a jurisdictional address. Even so, I can add authorized receivers to my virtual Cayman mailbox according to the service settings. I'd just have to upload that person's ID (passport) scan and other details, and wait for approval. The problem would be if filing an amended Statement of Claim because of a Court order for amendment would suffer from another filing fee since the Cayman Islands associates a separate Statement of Claim filing as a unique fee event following an originating Writ.

It is disturbing that I left open the possibility for technicality-based attacks against spin-off cases, but I can't see any such possible arguments (if they are even considered seriously at all) as resulting in outright dismissal of any actions; especially because I am in fact an interested party with a distinct legal relationship and involvement in the case due to common interest in restoring harm perpetrated against family financials in whichever way the situation is analyzed. I don't want to call that an interest in the family 'estate' because I'm not due to directly receive and control any assets yet, but it's my common legal interest with the victimized family member. However, I'll have to see if any seriously-considered challenge actually arises in that context.

It's particularly hard for me to see that line of thought holding up as an argument in arbitration which entails a mix of negotiation and formal argumentation, followed by an arbiter making decisions only if needed. In the circumstances around web host/DNS entities, I'm primarily seeking equitable relief on behalf of the originating US Federal District Court case in the first place, and primarily offered arbitration for negotiation on the facts in my status as someone who was co-granted leave to send a subpoena (the entities decided to resist every step of the way anyway) where it was also domesticated into the principal place of business (a different US State) of the entities in question. Otherwise, in hindsight, I could have filed at least into the relevant Superior Court on the basis of the contract's choice of jurisdiction law which allows filing into a registrant entity's jurisdiction of domicile.

The Binance situation is more complicated because a case had to be domesticated into a non-US jurisdiction entirely given that the Court of the originating case wouldn't send a cross-judicial Letter of Request and I couldn't get Cayman's Other Authority to process a request I directly emailed. However, it also ultimately arose from my sending a subpoena out of the originating US Federal District Court case and thus also primarily seeks equitable relief for the benefit of that case (but within a jurisdictionally-appropriate Norwich manner; where the Cayman Islands recognizes the seeking of such relief (equitable remedy in discovery) for the benefit of a potentially foreign cause outside of the Hague process per precedent in my article outlining various data privacy laws and policies).

Background regarding example document format

The affected family member's name has been redacted, and I'm not providing the full cryptocurrency hash address of the initial transfer.

I am not a lawyer, but I laid out the description of the scenario and description of evidence in a legal style in case it could be used as the basis for a draft, such as toward a Norwich Pharmacal Order or a request for leave to subpoena an otherwise innocent third party (a crypto exchange). The exact format and wording would depend on Court jurisdiction, if pursuing a civil Court case route. This outline does not include the evidence in itself specific to this scenario (trace reports, bank account information, Coinbase account records and website account screenshots).

This format also only covers the process of seeking a discovery order from third parties caught up in the actions of unknown Defendants. Filing a Complaint and meeting cause to have a Complaint accepted in a particular jurisdiction is an entirely different matter, depending on the damages sought and originating jurisdiction involved. Ultimately in our case, I filed initially in US District Court based on the citizenship of Plaintiffs (myself and the family member who suffered losses). Per the notes above, however, I expect the case in its entirety to be complicated by the jurisdictions of the actual Defendants.

I. EXAMPLE - NATURE OF REQUEST

Applicant used the website vip.biitflyeir.com for trading activities (exchanging one cryptocurrency for another on the market) from May 10, 2022 to Aug 22, 2022. An Ethereum address (hash ID) and an alleged USDT address were generated by the website upon Applicant's account creation. The hash IDs were listed on the website under Applicant's account, and Applicant appeared to have full control of all activities occurring through these addresses with the website's mechanisms.

Applicant transferred Ethereum cryptocurrency from his Coinbase account, in the value of approximately 60,000 USD (sixty-thousand United States dollars), to his biitflyeir.com-generated Ethereum hash ID throughout this period.

The transfer of this Ethereum occurred on Applicant's understanding that he retained full control over his deposit for the purposes of cryptocurrency trading. This model (server-side hosted wallets) is evidenced on well-established platforms such as Coinbase, Binance.com and Binance.us.

When Applicant desired to move an apparent resulting amount of USDT cryptocurrency from these activities from his biitflyeir.com-generated USDT address to his Coinbase USDT address on August 22, 2022, all of his transfer attempts failed. It shall be shown that the original Ethereum cryptocurrency deposit was in fact cashed out into fiat currency (United States dollars) on Binance 14, a cryptocurrency exchange wallet hosted by Binance.com, through a series of hash address transactions not under the Applicant's control. This was in contradiction to activity and account statements on the biitflyeir.com website.

The only civil remedy of Applicant is to individually pursue the person, corporation or other legal entity who cashed out the cryptocurrency. Because the actual name and address of the person, corporation or other legal entity are not disclosed in themselves through pseudonymous blockchain ledger activity, Applicant requires information from the cryptocurrency exchange involved in the transaction.

Applicant seeks the Court to order that Binance.com (operator of the Binance 14 wallet) provide identifying information of this person, corporation or other legal entity. Specifically, Applicant seeks the bank account number and banking institution where the cryptocurrency was cashed out.

II. EXAMPLE - PARTIES

John Doe (Applicant) is a citizen of the United States with principle location in Seattle, Washington.

Christopher Clayton is a citizen of the United States with principle location in Seattle, Washington (Exhibit A and Exhibit B for showing of familial relationship with Applicant).

Upon the findings of cryptocurrency professionals, Binance.com has been identified as holding key information as to the identity of the person, corporation or other legal entity who cashed out Applicant's crytpocurrency without his knowledge or control.

III. EXAMPLE - APPLICANT'S ASSET OWNERSHIP AND RIGHTS

1. Applicant transferred 60,000 USD (sixty-thousand United States dollars) in total worth of Ethereum crytpocurrency across several transactions, between May 10, 2022 and Aug 1, 2022 to hash address # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7. The hash address can be found through any blockchain viewer, such as Etherscan.io.

2. Applicant first funded his Coinbase account through Chase outbound wires (Chase Bank account ##### for outbound transactions) to Cross River Bank account ##### (under ownership of Coinbase Inc.). This is outlined in Exhibit C, rows 3 through 12 (Microsoft Excel file).

3. Applicant purchased Ethereum cryptocurrency on Coinbase and sent it to hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 through his Coinbase account (Exhibit D for purchasing records through Coinbase, and outbound transactions from Coinbase to the aforementioned hash address).

4. The hash address 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 was generated upon his creation of an account on vip.biitflyeir.com, and remained visible on Applicant's account throughout his activities on the site (Exhibit E).

5. Applicant used the site in the same manner as one would use other server-side digital wallet systems with the same or similar functionality (e.g. Coinbase, Binance.com, Binance.us).

IV. EXAMPLE - HANDLING OF ASSETS STORED THROUGH ETHEREUM HASH ADDRESS # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 CONTRARY TO APPARENT WEBSITE ACTIVITY

1. After Applicant transferred cryptocurrency from Coinbase to Ethereum hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7, Applicant began using his account on the website which had generated this address (vip.biitflyeir.com). Exhibit F shows the trading platform itself, which looked and functioned as other typical cryptocurrency trading sites (real-time price updates and apparent buttons to make cryptocurrency exchange orders).

2. Applicant was encouraged to continue trading cryptocurrency on this type of website through Telegram application messages. The specific website (biitflyeir.com) was either not mentioned in the text exchanges, or the conversation explicitly mentioning it was lost. Screenshots of some messages and a text transcription are provided in Exhibit G. The original messages were deleted through Telegram's end-to-end deletion protocols. To Applicant's knowledge, the senders are still free to continue text messaging activities of this nature on the Telegram platform.

3. After seemingly making gains in the form of USDT (United States Dollar Tether) cryptocurrency through the use of the site's apparent trading and exchange mechanisms, Applicant desired to withdraw all of the USDT cryptocurrency to a different hash ID of his choosing on August 12, 2022. However, 100,000 of the USDT (alleged principal and gains) had disappeared from his account ledger under the reason of “disposal of closing funds” on August 3, 2023. 29,000 remaining alleged units of USDT cryptocurrency failed to be withdrawn after he attempted to do so repeatedly through August 22, 2022. The reason given in Mandarin after each attempt indicated that the action failed, and that the funds had been remitted back to the biitflyeir.com account (Exhibit H).

4. It turned out that the USDT hash address listed on his account through the website, which Applicant thought he was using to conduct currency trades into USDT with his deposit of Ethereum, did not exist. The alleged USDT hash # 0xe30ebdc51e4d522a631184b788e4b81c326553a5 failed to show as a valid search result in August 2022 upon review by Christopher, using the blockchain viewer Etherscan.io (Exhibit I).

5. It has been shown from two cryptocurrency professionals that the original Ethereum cryptocurrency that Applicant transferred to hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 was in fact transferred to multiple other hash addresses in series. The Applicant had no control over this transfer process or the other hash IDs, with the cryptocurrency ultimately arriving at two final transaction ID destinations (cash-out points). The actual Ethereum cryptocurrency was being withdrawn from the hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 as soon as incoming transactions came in from Applicant, contrary to the account totals and trading activity indicated by Applicant's own account activities on vip.biitflyeir.com. The Ethereum instead went through conversion into USDT through the Tokenlon cryptocurrency exchange, and eventually was cashed out on the Binance 14 server.

a. Exhibit J – AAA Tracing Firm's report indicates how the Ethereum was eventually transferred to the Binance 14 exchange at two separate cash-out points.

i. USDT transaction ID # 0x786d2453b1354e3431737da499816 (final cash-out point) for the value of 25,000 USDT cryptocurrency.

ii. USDT transaction ID # 0x81b014487c3d951f13d88791bc (final cash-out point) for the value of 27,200 USDT cryptocurrency.

6. BBB Tracing, LLC further confirmed the cash-out points in a series of three technical graphs illustrating the transaction flow from Coinbase to the Binance 14 wallet (Exhibit K).

7. GoDaddy.com, the registrar for biitflyeir.com, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), ultimately agreed on review that the site was suspicious and ceased web hosting services for it (Exhibit L). However, no material action on their part was taken to identify the person, corporation or other legal entity who initiated this specific cash-out activity. Christopher initiated the registrar complaint on Applicant's behalf through ICANN's reporting mechanism.

V. EXAMPLE - BASIS FOR INFORMATION DISCOVERY

1. The loss of 60,000 USD in value by Applicant due to cryptocurrency blockchain activities outside of his control occurred because of specific actions taken by another person, corporation or other legal entity. They were not passive investment or trading-derived losses. Only another person, corporation or other legal entity could have taken those actions.

2. Applicant was led to believe through the functioning of the site vip.biiflyeir.com that he was conducting legitimate cryptocurrency trades through a server-side (hosted) wallet, in the same manner as other common cryptocurrency trading platforms.

3. It is shown from the analysis of multiple cryptocurrency tracing professionals that his 60,0000 USD value worth of Ethereum was transferred from hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 in a series of transactions after his initial deposit. The cryptocurrency was ultimately sold on the Binance 14 wallet without his knowledge, permission, or control in this outbound process.

4. The activities of the person, corporation or other legal entity who cashed out the cryptocurrency, which directly contradict the account feedback that Applicant received from his exchange activities on the website biitflyeir.com, represent fraudulent misrepresentation toward Applicant as to the true nature of his control over Ethereum hash ID # 0x27fc7bF37c2649a7 and the non-extant USDT hash ID # 0xe30ebdc51e4d522a631184b788e4b81c326553a5.

CITATIONS

1. Scam Adviser, https://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/bittrex168.com, accessed 29 Apr 2023.

2. ICANN, https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/privacy-proxy-registration-2013-03-22-en, accessed 29 Apr 2023.

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2022/07/01/pig-butchering-crypto-scam-victim-to-get-money-back-from-binance-law-enforcement-says/?sh=5b3880a45ecd, accessed 29 Apr 2023.

4. ABC News, https://abcnews.go.com/Business/americans-lost-103-billion-internet-scams-2022-fbi/story?id=97832789, accessed 29 Apr 2023.

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8. Harris Bricken, https://harrisbricken.com/chinalawblog/hague-service-of-process-on-chinese-defendants/, accessed 19 June 2023.

9. Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China, http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Law/2007-12/12/content_1383880.htm, English version accessed 4 June 2023.

10. Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/fintech-crypto-fraud-thailand/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us, accessed 24 November 2023.

11. Commodities Futures Trade Commission, https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8825, accessed 24 November 2023.

12. FBI Victim Services Division, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/financial_crime.pdf, accessed 30 December 2023.

13. Thomson Reuters, https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/investigation-fraud-and-risk/pig-butchering-scams/, accessed 30 December 2023.

14. Binance UK sub-page, https://www.binance.com/en-GB, accessed 6 March 2024.

15. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2024/04/15/1243189142/scam-baiter-kitboga?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us, 16 April 2024.

16. PrivacyLaw.com, https://privacylaw.proskauer.com/2011/05/articles/miscellaneous/third-party-discovery-of-foreign-bank-records-should-first-proceed-under-the-hague-convention/, accessed 16 August 2024.

17. LanguageAlliance.com, https://www.languagealliance.com/blog/taking-discovery-in-china-for-use-in-u-s-litigation/, accessed 5 September 2025.

18. American University, Washington College of Law, https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1602&context=aulr, accessed 31 July 2025.

19. Money Laundering News, https://www.moneylaunderingnews.com/category/civil-liability-to-private-parties/, accessed 26 September 2025.

20. GW Law, https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2790&context=faculty_publications, accessed 21 May 2025

21. The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/blog/is-it-possible-to-circumvent-%C2%A7-230-with-contract-claims/, accessed 21 November 2025.

22. Bennett Jones, https://www.bennettjones.com/Insights/Updates/Norwich-Orders, accessed 26 November 2025.

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