Inheritance Heists Ch. 10: Cryptocurrency and Estate Disputes

I’m Mike Hackard with Hackard Law.  I’m sharing passages from my new book Inheritance Heists – and I hope that they can help you avoid estate disaster.

Over more recent years I’ve represented several clients in litigation revolving around cryptocurrency – BitCoin, Ethereum, and other digital assets.

While cryptocurrency is now recognized as a real store of value, it comes with several challenges when an estate is in dispute.

Here are some key factors:

Unknown assets:

A decedent may not leave any record of their cryptocurrency investments, leaving family unaware of the fortune they had accumulated.

Multiple wallets, unknown passwords:

Even if family knew about the cryptocurrencies, a decedent may have used various hardware wallets to store them, each protected by complex passwords and seed phrases.

Without these, the funds are essentially locked away forever.

Two-factor authentication:

A decedent’s exchange accounts could be secured with two-factor authentication tied to their personal devices, which are now inaccessible.

Lack of inventory:

A decedent might not leave behind any comprehensive inventory of digital assets, making it difficult to even know the full extent of their holdings.

Jurisdictional issues:

If a family lives, let’s say, in Florida, and the digital assets are in California, questions of jurisdiction further complicate the matter.

Digital assets are harder to track down than real property, but with our experience and expert partners, we’ve been able to recover significant sums for clients.

If you suspect cryptocurrency has been misappropriated in an estate dispute and you need help, you can call us at Hackard Law: 916-313-3030. We want to hear your story.