Reference
Glossary
The terms used across this site, in plain words. The same definitions appear as hover notes wherever a term shows up in a dossier or exercise.
English court procedure
- freezing order
- A court order stopping someone moving or hiding assets before judgment. Breaching it is contempt of court.
- worldwide freezing order
- A freezing order covering the defendant's assets wherever in the world they are.
- proprietary injunction
- An order preserving a specific asset the claimant says belongs to them — it attaches to the thing itself, not just the defendant.
- Bankers Trust order
- An order requiring a bank or exchange to hand over customer information so stolen funds can be traced.
- Norwich Pharmacal order
- An order requiring an innocent third party caught up in wrongdoing to identify the wrongdoer.
- persons unknown
- Defendants sued before they can be named — standard in crypto fraud, where at first only wallet addresses are known.
- service out of the jurisdiction
- The court's permission to serve proceedings on a defendant outside England and Wales.
- gateway 25
- The rule (Practice Direction 6B) that lets a claimant serve overseas parties with applications for information about stolen assets.
- constructive trust
- When the law treats whoever holds an asset as holding it for its true owner.
- unjust enrichment
- A claim to make someone give back a benefit they should not have kept.
- conversion
- The tort of treating someone else's goods as your own. Yuen v Li (2026) held it does not extend to crypto.
- tracing
- Following value through transfers, swaps and exchanges to show where it ended up.
- dissipation
- Moving or hiding assets so that a future judgment cannot reach them.
- good arguable case
- The threshold for interim orders like freezes — more than merely arguable, well short of proven.
- without notice
- An application made before the other side is told — used where warning them would defeat the order's purpose.
- neutral citation
- The court's own permanent reference for a judgment, e.g. [2022] EWHC 1723 (Ch). Cite this, not a news report.
- civil forfeiture
- A claim brought against the property itself rather than a person — the state proves the assets are tainted, no conviction needed.
Crypto & the ledger
- seed phrase
- The list of words that can recreate a wallet on any device. Whoever has it controls the funds.
- private key
- The secret number that signs transactions from an address. Possession of the key is control of the funds.
- cold wallet
- A wallet whose keys are kept on an offline device, out of reach of remote attackers.
- NFT
- A unique token on a blockchain. In D'Aloia the court allowed court papers to be served by placing one in the fraudster's wallet.
- UTXO
- An unspent transaction output — how Bitcoin records value. A wallet's balance is the sum of the outputs its keys can spend.
- coinbase transaction
- The transaction in each block that creates new coin as the mining reward, plus the block's fees.
- confirmation
- One block built on top of the block containing a transaction. More confirmations, more settled.
- block height
- A block's position in the chain, counted from zero at the genesis block.
- transaction hash
- The unique identifier of a transaction. Quote it and anyone, anywhere, can pull up the same record.
- mixer
- A service that pools many deposits so the visible link between sender and recipient is broken.
- stablecoin
- A token designed to track a currency, run by an issuer who can typically freeze balances — e.g. USDT or USDC.
- unhosted wallet
- A wallet controlled directly by its user rather than by an exchange.
- VASP
- Virtual-asset service provider — an exchange, custodian or similar business handling crypto for customers.
- block explorer
- A website for looking up transactions, addresses and blocks on a public blockchain.
- smart contract
- Code deployed on a blockchain that holds and moves funds according to its own rules.
Investigation & sanctions
- travel rule
- The requirement that sender and recipient identity data accompany crypto transfers between providers (FATF Recommendation 16).
- SDN list
- The main US sanctions list. US persons are prohibited from dealing with listed people and addresses.
- designation
- The act of adding a person, entity or address to a sanctions list, on a stated date under a stated legal power.
- attribution
- A claim about who is behind an address. Never a ledger fact — always cite who made the claim and when.
- corroboration
- Checking the same fact in two independent sources before relying on it.
- chain of custody
- The record of who held a piece of evidence and when — what makes an exhibit usable later.
See the terms in use: