According to Cointelegraph, the Singapore High Court has granted permission to financial investigation firm Intelligent Sanctuary (iSanctuary) to attach nonfungible tokens (NFTs) containing a legal document to cold wallets associated with a hack. A court-issued worldwide freeze order was tokenized as soulbound NFTs and attached to the wallets in question. The NFTs will not prevent transactions with the wallets but will serve as a warning to counterparties and exchanges that the wallets were involved in a hack. Additionally, iSanctuary claimed it has devised a means of tracking funds leaving the wallets, thanks to the NFTs. The NFTs will be permanently attached to the wallets.
iSanctuary was employed by a businessperson who had lost $3 million in crypto assets and was able to track the stolen funds. The on-chain and off-chain evidence was presented by an iSanctuary senior investigator to the Singapore High Court, and the worldwide injunction, a first issued by that court, was granted. iSanctuary financial and crypto investigators identified a series of cold wallets holding the proceeds of the crime, and their method of service via NFT was accepted by the court. Mintology, an app created by Singaporean NFT studio Mintable, was named as the producer of the NFTs.
The Straits Times reported that the case was related to a stolen private key and that Singapore-based crypto exchanges were involved in laundering the funds from the hack by fraudsters "purported to be from Singapore." The case spans countries from Singapore to Spain, Ireland, Britain, and other European countries. iSanctuary founder Jonathan Benton stated, "This is a game changer; it can happen in hours if needed. We can serve on wallets and start to police the blockchain, identify those holding illicit assets, serve civil or criminal orders, even red flags." NFTs have been used to deliver court summonses in Italy and the United States.
