A man has tried to bribe a court registrar to release information related to a cryptocurrency case. Picture / 123RF
A man claiming to be an affected party in the collapse of a multimillion-dollar cryptocurrency company has tried to bribe a court registrar to release information related to the case for $2 million in Bitcoin.
New Zealand-based company Cryptopia was allegedly hacked in January 2019, leading to the loss of about $30m in cryptocurrency held by it in an exchange.
The business tried to reopen, but customer trust was low following the hack, and it went into liquidation. Liquidators are still trying to disentangle its finances and return funds to customers where possible.
In December last year, public accountancy firm Grant Thornton announced that $400 million in cryptocurrency had been returned to about 10,000 customers.
Then, in June this year, the firm announced a further 2624 customers had received $50m in Bitcoin and Dogecoin.
It was also preparing to launch distributions to affected customers to qualifying account holders in Cardano, Tether, Tron and Litecoin currencies.
Cryptopia, founded by Adam Clark and Rob Dawson, owed IRD more than $19m and a further $22m to unsecured creditors. The accountancy firm has said it was unclear whether there would be money remaining to pay those creditors.
Now, a man claiming to be a creditor has applied to the High Court at Christchurch to access court documents related to the liquidation of Cryptopia.
The case has been before the court since liquidators applied for a court order to sell some of Cryptopia’s bitcoin to pay their own fees in liquidating the company.
The documents the man requested were related to an affidavit filed in 2019 by one of the liquidators, David Ruscoe, in which he annexed two spreadsheets containing databases of commercially sensitive and confidential information relating to 960,000 of Cryptopia’s account holders and their cryptocurrency holdings.
The court had received the information on a USB drive.
According to court documents, a court registrar inadvertently sent it to Thomas Cattermole, who runs an unincorporated enterprise called “Cryptopia Rescue” that purports to offer help to former customers of Cryptopia.
Grant Thornton then took Cattermole to court, claiming he was in contempt of court for passing the information held on that USB to third parties, and secured an injunction to stop him sharing the information further.
Any member of the public can request documents held by a court, but it’s at the judge’s discretion to release them.
In this case, the man, emailed the Christchurch High Court registry requesting access to the confidential spreadsheet.
“I would like to seek out answers as to why the TRUSTEE / Liquidator are hiding the blockchain wallet addresses for my assets. They have breached trust law, and I would like to seek out the return of my funds. I need assets returned to me,” his email read.
Grant Thornton opposed those documents being released, noting that a person by the same name was currently going through the account registration process to receive funds released by liquidators.
In addition to filing a request for access to Ruscoe’s affidavit, the man emailed a court registrar and said he had faced “significant barriers” in accessing the information he was seeking.
A registrar responded, identifying themselves as the case manager, and the man then replied with allegations about the conduct of the liquidators.
He told the registrar that if they saw “anything dodgy happen”, to email a private email address, which he provided.
“They can’t pay you, but I think they will donate 10 bitcoin to any wallet of the whistleblower’s choice,” his email said.
Ten Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to $2 million at the time the ruling was issued.
The man also accused High Court judge, Justice Andru Isac, of holding a private teleconference with the liquidators.
In a recent ruling by Justice Isac declining the man’s application for the requested documents, he pointed out that the man had attempted to arrange an unlawful Bitcoin payment to a member of the court registry in exchange for information, before providing an email address to facilitate a private response.
“Given the applicant’s improper attempt to solicit information from a Court officer I am satisfied the request for access to Court documents is an abuse of process,” Justice Isac said.
“The party lodging the request has not provided proof of their identity. They claim to be residing overseas.
“And as the premise of the application is the applicant’s desire to be repatriated with an account held by Cryptopia, given the liquidators have an identification process available to the applicant, it is unclear why he should need access to Court documents to establish his interest in the relevant account.
“That information should already be available to him.”
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū, covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.