30/09/2022

At last! A new jurisdictional gateway permitting service of third-party disclosure orders out of the jurisdiction

Paul Lowenstein KC and Sam Goodman discuss their role in developing new disclosure gateway 25 and what this means for international fraud litigation.

The Courts in England and Wales are rightly seen as the gold-standard jurisdiction for complex, international fraud and asset-tracing litigation. However, for a while now, fraudsters engaged in rapid cross-border cyber and money transfer frauds have been outpacing developments in the legal system, making the process of tracing, securing and enforcing against assets difficult and expensive, and sometimes impossible.

The difficulty in most international transfer fraud cases is that the victim does not know what has happened to their assets (be they money, crypto or something else), or who received them and what has subsequently become of them. The fraudsters operate under the cloak of secrecy afforded by digital systems and very often the only clue as to what has become of the assets are faint traces on a pseudonymous blockchain. There may sometimes be a hint of who taken them in an IP address or an anonymous email account.

Read the full article.

Annex A – CPRC Service Sub-Committee Paper (PDF 235KB)

Read our previous article relating to gateway changes from Charles Kimmins KC and Josh Folkard.