A New York man and two corporate entities have filed a massive lawsuit against 39,069 individual digital wallets. The plaintiffs want to be recognized as the legal owners of the wallets and the millions of dollars in cryptocurrency contained within them.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, targets “John Does 1-39,069”.
The “finder” and the algorithm
According to the first amended complaint, the mystery began in the fall of 2024 when plaintiff Noah Doe “identified a security issue with digital wallets resulting in owners losing their ability to withdraw the contents and then abandoning their digital wallets”.
Doe scanned blockchain protocols with the help of a self-developed custom method to isolate self-custodied wallets that had shown no activity for at least five years.
Between December 2024 and April 2025, Doe ran his program and successfully captured electronic records and addresses for tens of thousands of those wallets that were seemingly discarded.
The legal filing argues that these wallets represent concrete, definable property. “Just as physical cash is not held in folders linked to each bank account, a digital wallet does not hold the digital currency but is, itself, a ledger. […] loss of a private key does not destroy the property, the digital wallet, or its rights to any of the digital currency to which it is entitled.”
Turning to the NYPD
Doe treated the digital addresses exactly like found physical property. On three separate occasions, he loaded the wallet data onto USB drives and walked into the NYPD’s 17th Precinct station to turn them over to authorities.
The NYPD held the USB drives for months. The police ended up returning the first batch after eleven months, the second after four months, and the third after eight months. They issued property invoices and receipts to Doe as the official finder.
Under the New York Personal Property Law, a finder must make reasonable efforts to locate the true owner before claiming title. Doe launched a high-tech notification campaign to give potential owners a chance to step forward.
His team used an advanced blockchain software technique known as an OP_RETURN to insert communication tokens into the found wallets. These tokens directed anyone looking at the wallets to a webpage hosting an official “Abandonment Notice”. Doe hired consultants to put out a global press release.
The outreach worked for some. A total of 424 wallet owners took “on-chain” action to signal that their funds were not abandoned.
However, 39,069 wallets met the notice with absolute silence.
Now that more than a full year has passed since the wallets were discovered and reported to the police, Doe claims that he has legal ownership.
“Absent a court action to ‘quiet title,’ Plaintiffs will suffer ongoing and foreseeable damage and harm as prospective transaction counterparties and third parties will continue to question Plaintiffs’ ownership,” the complaint concludes.
