Given the scope and speed at which fraud occurs in the nascent cryptocurrency space, it’s easy to think little can be done to fight back. But as two litigators found out in a recent case in Delaware, there is a way to bring fraudsters to justice: It just requires a fair amount of help from cryptocurrency exchanges, which is not always guaranteed.
In December 2017, Elizabeth White, CEO of a Delaware-registered company which sells fine art, and luxury goods and invests in cryptocurrency, was defrauded out of 484,000 XRP, a cryptocurrency offered by Ripple Labs, by an anonymous man who agreed to trade bitcoin for her XRP. Instead, the man ended up allegedly manipulating the escrow and exchange platform Cointal to steal White’s cryptocurrency.
