Could law enforcement agencies tasked with recovering stolen cryptoassets have a silver bullet in their arsenal? In this week’s NLJ, Ashley Fairbrother, partner, and Joe Nahal-Macdonald, senior associate, at Edmonds Marshall McMahon, and Sarah Wood, barrister at 5 St Andrews Hill, examine the new powers provided by Part 5 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, courtesy of legislation implemented in 2024.
Part 5 now provides for ‘the seizure, detention, freezing and forfeiture of cryptoassets and related items’, and these powers are exercisable by the magistrates’ court. This could be highly useful, given British Virgin Islands-based company Tether’s ‘ability to destroy tokens (burning) and issue new ones (minting) to manage supply or adjust token balances across different blockchains’.
Fairbrother, Nahal-Macdonald and Wood write: ‘The choice by law enforcement must be purposive constructive of legislation, to use their most powerful weapon—POCA 2002—to tackle fraudsters and help their victims, which US law enforcement has shown no hesitation in doing.’RELATED ARTICLES
