England and Wales - Market Insights

Market trends in asset tracing and enforcement

Fraud is now the most commonly experienced crime in England and Wales, and for businesses it has moved from a back-office nuisance to a board-level risk. For international claimants , the significance of the English market is in the distinctive legal and procedural tools the English courts offer, adapting established equitable principles to new technologies and reinforcing England and Wales’s position as a leading jurisdiction for cross-border fraud litigation and asset recovery.

The rise of AI-enabled fraud

What has changed most in recent years is not the underlying typology of fraud but the tooling. AI has lowered the barrier to entry, letting fraudsters industrialise their operations, tailor attacks across borders and impersonate trusted people and institutions at scale.

The recent rise of public AI has supercharged hacking and phishing techniques. Phishing emails once betrayed by clumsy grammar are now drafted by generative models, fluent, personalised and rotated automatically to evade filters. Synthetic identities that blend real and generated documents and photos allow fraudsters to open fraudulent accounts, slipping through even robust compliance checks. And audio-visual deepfakes present convincing impersonations of executives, family members and public figures.

Retail investment fraud and romance fraud continue to drive much of the harm, with victims often groomed for months. Social media remains the primary acquisition channel, and the majority of authorised push payment fraud cases now originate online. AI has made fraudulent promotions markedly more convincing. Deepfaked video “endorsements” of recognisable figures are deployed to lend false credibility to bogus platforms, echoing the celebrity-impersonation Bitcoin scams seen in earlier years.

Businesses have not been immune from this shift. The human controls around corporate payments have long been a target for fraud, but the credible deepfakes have given new life to those attacks. Corporate exposure is now not only concentrated where authority and urgency intersect (a fake email from the CFO demanding an urgent payment) but in the very defences information security teams worldwide have spent the decades erecting (do not trust the email; speak to them). Industry data from 2025 suggests that detected deepfake attempts in the UK rose by around 94% year on year, a striking measure of how quickly the technology has been weaponised.

Corporates’ widespread use of AI tools has introduced a new attack surface: prompt injection. The rise of so-called “vibe coding” — building software through natural-language prompts rather than hand-written code — has a darker mirror: the same low barrier lets malicious actors just as easily “vibe hack” their way past corporate defences.

For asset tracing purposes, AI changes the texture of the problem more than its legal substance. Funds can be moved out of reach within minutes of the deception succeeding, and the window to freeze value is often measured in hours. When the wrongdoer is a synthetic identity, identifying them, fixing the moment of loss, and assembling reliable evidence at that pace becomes far harder. The law has kept pace; the challenge is now one of speed and evidence rather than principle.

From an English law perspective, AI is more likely to test existing private law principles than require new ones. This approach is reflected in the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce’s (UKJT) Legal Statement on Liability for AI Harms published on 7 July 2026 which concludes that English law possesses a flexible framework to respond to many AI-enabled harms (through established doctrines including deceit) and the means to redress deliberate wrongdoing.

That continuity mirrors the approach the English courts adopted towards cryptoassets earlier. This incremental development of the common law remains one of England’s defining advantages in international fraud and asset recovery actions.

Cryptocurrency fraud and asset recovery: a maturing framework

Cryptoassets remain the asset class most closely associated with digital fraud, and it is here that English law has developed most.

While the speculative frenzy of the early crypto markets has largely subsided, pump-and-dump manipulation of thinly traded tokens persists, sustained by coordinated messaging across online communities and large-scale thefts from exchanges and custodians remain a recurring source of dispute, exposing corporate treasuries and digital-asset businesses alike. In each case the recovery analysis follows a familiar path: identify and freeze, trace through the blockchain, and pursue disclosure against the intermediaries through which value re-enters the regulated financial system.

England was among the first jurisdictions to recognise that established principles of property and equity could accommodate cryptoassets without requiring wholesale legislative reform. The UKJT’s influential 2019 Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts was rapidly adopted by the English courts and has influenced judicial reasoning across other common law jurisdictions.

The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, in force since 2 December 2025, now puts beyond doubt that crypto-tokens, NFTs and other digitally native assets constitute personal property. Its practical significance is considerable: clear property status underpins proprietary claims, tracing, the use of digital assets as collateral, their treatment on insolvency, and their inclusion in trusts and on the balance sheet.

Recent cases provide a cautionary tale. In D’Aloia v. Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 2342 (Ch), the claimant, who had lost around GBP 2.5 million to an investment scam, ultimately failed in his claim against a crypto exchange because he could not prove on the evidence that his funds had reached the relevant wallet. The court scrutinised the blockchain tracing analysis in detail, confirming that while several methodologies (including “first in, first out”) are legitimate, the chosen method must be clearly identified and applied coherently and consistently. The message for claimants and their advisers is that, as claims increasingly target identifiable exchanges rather than anonymous fraudsters, recovery will turn on rigorous, properly pleaded tracing evidence rather than on the now-settled question of property status.

Recovery increasingly runs alongside regulatory enforcement, and the two can be mutually reinforcing for victims. The FCA has shown growing willingness to pursue offshore actors directly, including recently in proceedings against the HTX exchange, deploying the persons unknown and newcomer injunction machinery in a financial services context for the first time. As the UK moves to bring cryptoasset activity more fully within the regulatory perimeter, consumers, businesses and their advisers can expect a denser web of obligations on exchanges that may, in turn, support civil recovery and strengthen the leverage available to claimants.

Procedural innovation

The English courts have continued to adapt procedure to the reality that fraudsters are often unidentifiable, a recurring obstacle when a counterparty in a fraudulent transaction has no name and no known or fixed address.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Wolverhampton City Council v. London Gypsies and Travellers [2023] UKSC 47, although not a fraud case, confirmed that injunctions may be granted against “newcomers” who have not yet acted or been identified, reinforcing the persons unknown jurisdiction on which many asset recovery actions in this digital age frequently depend.

Because the exchanges and intermediaries a victim needs information from are usually offshore, much turns on whether disclosure orders can reach beyond the jurisdiction. Here the earlier concern has eased considerably. Amendments to the Civil Procedure Rules introduced a dedicated jurisdictional gateway for information and disclosure orders, and the courts have used it to permit service of Bankers Trust orders on overseas exchanges.

The reach of disclosure orders has widened in substance as well as geography. In Williams v. Nest Services Limited [2025] EWHC 1409 (Comm), the court confirmed that Norwich Pharmacal relief may extend to recipients of assets who are not yet identifiable but whose identities may emerge through ongoing disclosure.

Looking further ahead, the Law Commission has proposed a free-standing information order to assist claimants at the earliest investigative stage, a development worth watching for any potential claimant that must identify a wrongdoer before it can frame a claim.

What the future holds

The direction of travel is clear. Fraud has industrialised, and AI is the accelerant, making deception cheaper, faster and far more convincing, and raising the evidential and timing challenges for any victim seeking to trace and recover misappropriated value.

Against that, England has consolidated its position as a leading forum for asset and fraud recovery. The common law’s characteristic flexibility, which allowed the courts to extend freezing orders, proprietary injunctions and disclosure relief to cryptoassets in the first place, has now been reinforced by statute, and the procedural toolkit for pursuing anonymous, cross-border wrongdoers has matured accordingly.

For corporates in particular, the priority is prevention and readiness. Hardening payment-authorisation and vendor-onboarding controls against synthetic-identity and deepfake attacks; treating real-time voice and video confirmation as no longer sufficient on its own; rehearsing an incident-response plan that can move within hours; and lining up forensic tracing and litigation capability in advance.

After a loss, the lesson of recent decisions is that establishing the principle is no longer the hard part. Victims that wish to recover must move quickly. Those that do will find a judiciary, and now a legislature, which has shown a sustained willingness to ensure that fraudsters can be pursued across boundaries, virtual and geographical alike.