No two people say “I do” expecting to end up arguing over a hardware wallet in front of a judge. But that’s exactly where a growing number of couples are landing, and crypto has been quietly
No two people say “I do” expecting to end up arguing over a hardware wallet in front of a judge. But that’s exactly where a growing number of couples are landing, and crypto has been quietly showing up in divorce court cases for years now, in disputes that look nothing like a standard fight over a house or a pension. A seed phrase can give one spouse total, unilateral control over millions of dollars with no bank or third party able to access it. However, many people assume this means a court could never find it.
This article walks through three cases in the UK and the US where crypto became the central issue in a divorce or related property dispute, and shows exactly how each one played out.
This article covers general legal principles under US and UK law and is not legal advice. Divorce laws vary significantly by state and country. If you’re going through a divorce involving crypto, consult a family law attorney experienced in digital assets.
Ping Fai Yuen kept 2,323 Bitcoin, worth just under $60 million at the time, in a Trezor hardware wallet secured by a PIN and a 24-word seed phrase. On August 2, 2023, without his knowledge, the entire holding moved to 71 new wallet addresses, and since December 21 2023, the Bitcoin hasn’t moved.
Yuen’s case is that his estranged wife, Fun Yung Li, secretly recorded him entering his seed phrase using a home security camera, then used it to drain the wallet, either alone or with her sister’s help. His daughter had earlier tipped him off that Li was targeting his funds, prompting him to install hidden audio recorders.
Those recordings are now part of the public court record. In one exchange from July 29, 2023, a voice believed to be Li’s can be heard asking whether the transfer could be traced back to her: “In that case can he see that the item has been transferred to your…” Two days later, another recording captures apparent confusion over whether the theft had already been detected: “The Bitcoin has transferred to me but can it be seen that you have taken it?” followed by “Oh, it doesn’t know where it was taken to.”
Police searched Li’s property and seized ten cold wallets and five recovery seeds. Police arrested her, released her on bail, and later said no further action would be taken pending new evidence, pushing Yuen into civil court. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting Li after confronting her over the theft, a detail that complicates any clean narrative of victim and perpetrator. Li’s sister, named as a co-defendant, had reportedly been evading service and had not engaged with the proceedings at all as of early 2026.
The case is being heard under a brand-new piece of legislation. In December 2025, Parliament passed the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, formally recognizing digital assets as their own category of personal property under English law. Yuen v Li became one of the first cases to test it, though what’s happened so far is procedural, not a resolution. On March 10, 2026, Justice Cotter ruled on whether Yuen could even pursue his claim, and on what legal grounds. He struck out Yuen’s original claim of tortious conversion, the standard route for recovering stolen property, holding that English law limits conversion to tangible items someone can physically hold, following the House of Lords decision in OBG v Allan. Bitcoin doesn’t qualify. Yuen was allowed to amend his claim to proceed instead on the basis of proprietary restitution, unjust enrichment, and deceit. Justice Cotter assessed his chances under those theories as very high, in a case he described as “very far from complex.”
That’s where things stand, not where they end. No trial date had been set as of the ruling, and there’s no public evidence the case has gone further since. The Bitcoin itself, now worth roughly $172 million, is still sitting untouched across those 71 wallets.
What’s already clear is that the case undercuts the exact assumption Yuen likely held when he first set up that Trezor wallet. A seed phrase gave someone else total technical control, but it took a family member’s tip, a hidden microphone, and a new piece of legislation just to get the claim off the ground. The technology held up perfectly. Everything around it didn’t, and the legal fight over how to actually get the Bitcoin back is still being fought.
Francis DeSouza, later CEO of biotech company Illumina, and his wife Erica separated in 2013 and spent the next eight years, nearly as long as their marriage, litigating what happened to his cryptocurrency.
Free iStock photo of random divorcing couple. Source: BBC
DeSouza had bought a little over 1,000 Bitcoin before the split. He disclosed 1,062.21 BTC during the divorce, but that wasn’t everything. A substantial portion was trapped inside the collapsed Mt. Gox exchange, which was still working through a years-long bankruptcy. He also hadn’t disclosed Bitcoin he’d received automatically through the Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Cash hard forks, or a series of purchases he’d made after the divorce filing through friends acting as proxies, moving coins between wallets along the way.
Under California law, filing for divorce automatically triggers a restraining order barring either spouse from transferring, selling, or otherwise disposing of marital property without written consent or a court order. It applies the moment the petition is filed; no separate judicial action required. DeSouza bought more Bitcoin through proxies after that order was already in effect.
The California Court of Appeal found he’d violated the restraining order and breached his fiduciary duty to the community estate, a duty under Family Code section 1100(e) requiring spouses to manage shared property in good faith and keep each other reasonably informed of transactions that materially affect it. DeSouza argued the omissions didn’t matter since Erica had never taken much interest in their finances anyway. The court rejected that reasoning directly: past disinterest doesn’t predict what a spouse would do once they’ve hired a divorce lawyer and been served with restraining orders. Indifference before a divorce isn’t consent during one.
He was ordered to transfer $22,500 in cash and 249.445 additional Bitcoin to Erica, along with the corresponding Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Cash, plus her attorney’s fees.
Appellate court order Source: Justia
The line the appellate court wrote has been quoted in crypto divorce filings ever since: “the financial success of one undisclosed investment does not erase the harm to the community estate.”
Excerpt from appellate court order. Source: Justia
A DeSouza spokesperson disputed the characterization, saying he’d disclosed his holdings at the outset and informed Erica as soon as he learned about the Mt. Gox situation. The court’s findings, upheld on appeal, are final.
What DeSouza was left with says something. After the split, he kept 57 Bitcoin, worth roughly $2.5 million at prices years later, a fraction of what the original holding eventually grew into. Proxy purchases, fork coins, transfers between wallets, none of it made the assets harder to find. Every transaction was on-chain, permanently recorded, and traceable. It just made the court’s findings against him worse. More than five years on, DeSouza remains the case most family law attorneys cite first when a client tries to argue that hidden crypto is functionally unfindable.
This case exposes what happens when hidden crypto surfaces mid-proceedings, in a marriage where nearly everything else was already accounted for.
Anthony Culligan and Diane Rosemin-Culligan got married in the early 1990s and separated after roughly forty years together, by which point their combined assets totalled £27.3 million. Both had built ventures from very different starting points. Anthony turned a £10,000 Bitcoin purchase in 2012 into a holding worth close to £20 million by 2017. Diane founded and later sold ELSA Sports Services, the company behind the London City Lionesses football club.
Over the years, both sold off portions of the Bitcoin to fund their separate projects. Anthony used the proceeds to help build SETL Ltd, a blockchain company acquired by fintech firm Colendi in 2022, leaving him with a 3.6% stake the court’s expert valued at £19 million, or about £13.6 million after capital gains tax. The same Bitcoin also paid for renovations on the couple’s nine-bedroom family home, complete with seven bathrooms and a home cinema, valued around £5.9 million, and for eight rental properties worth a combined £2.6 million, generating £100,000 a year in rental income.
Mr Justice McDonald heard the case over four days in November 2024 and handed down judgment on January 14, 2025. Partway through proceedings, something interesting unfolded. An additional £371,000 in cryptocurrency surfaced that Anthony hadn’t included in his original disclosure. The court found this amounted to litigation misconduct. A follow-up ruling, [2025] EWFC 26, addressed roughly £1.3 million in resulting legal costs, weighing who should bear them given disclosure failures on both sides. Both rulings are final.
Final ruling on Culligan case. Source: Caselaw.nationalarchives
What makes Culligan a useful citation isn’t just the size of the numbers involved. It’s how ordinary the underlying dispute actually was. Strip out the word Bitcoin, and this is a standard high-net-worth divorce: a long marriage, competing business ventures, a contested family home, a late-surfacing asset that didn’t help anyone’s credibility. The crypto didn’t change the legal framework. It added a few more zeroes and a harder tracing problem, and by the time the costs ruling closed the case out, it had also added roughly £1.3 million in legal fees neither side particularly wanted to pay.
The Yuen, DeSouza, and Culligan cases answer the question most crypto holders have when they look for information about divorce and digital assets.
Can your spouse find your crypto?
Yes. Exchanges respond to subpoenas. Blockchain records are permanent. Device forensics recover wallet software, transaction confirmations, and browser history. Financial pattern analysis traces the bank transfers and credit card purchases that preceded the crypto purchase. Forensic investigation firms have traced more than $250 million in hidden cryptocurrency across marital cases, according to Hudson Intelligence.
Can the court divide it?
Yes. Crypto acquired during the marriage is generally treated as marital property regardless of where it is held. A hardware wallet, a DeFi protocol, a staking position, an NFT, all of it is subject to disclosure and division. California’s automatic temporary restraining order, which applies the moment a divorce is filed, covers crypto. So does New York’s revised Statement of Net Worth, which since March 2026 requires spouses to disclose cryptocurrency, NFTs, DeFi investments, and staking accounts with wallet addresses, quantities, and approximate market values under 22 NYCRR § 202.16.
What happens if you hide it?
The DeSouza ruling answers that question with a sentence that has travelled far beyond the California courts that produced it. The financial success of an undisclosed investment does not erase the harm to the community estate. Courts can award the concealed asset to the other spouse. They can place fees on anyone. They can reopen a finalized divorce if hidden assets emerge afterwards. In California, courts retain jurisdiction to divide undisclosed community property even after a divorce decree is issued.
And what about the timing?
The Yuen case makes the valuation question impossible to ignore. Bitcoin rose roughly 630% between December 2022 and December 2024. A couple who separated in early 2023 and finalized their divorce in late 2024 could see wildly different outcomes depending on whether the court applied the separation date, the filing date, or the distribution date. Courts in different jurisdictions handle this differently.
To manage the uncertainty, divorcing couples would often have to agree in advance on an average price over several weeks, a price from a named exchange on a specific date, or a true-up clause that adjusts the final split if the price moves significantly before the transfer is complete.
Blockchain does not forget. Neither do courts.
Yuen, DeSouza, and Culligan each involve different facts, different jurisdictions, and different amounts. What connects them is that each spouse who held crypto believed, at some level, that the technology gave them an advantage the other side could not overcome. A seed phrase. A proxy purchase. An undisclosed wallet. In each case, the court found them anyway.
If you are going through a divorce involving digital assets, on either side of the table, get a family law attorney with real crypto experience involved early. Not after the other side has already hired a forensic accountant. Early.
Whatever you hold, disclose it.
This article is not legal advice. Laws vary significantly by state and country. Consult a qualified attorney for advice specific to your situation.
Yes. A valid prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can specify whether cryptocurrency will be treated as separate or marital property in a divorce. However, courts may still review the agreement to ensure it complies with state law and was entered into voluntarily.
What happens if I lose access to my crypto wallet during a divorce?Losing access to a wallet does not automatically remove it from the divorce process. A court may require evidence showing the assets are genuinely inaccessible and may consider blockchain records, financial documents, and other evidence when determining ownership and value.
Can cryptocurrency be used to pay a divorce settlement?Yes. Instead of transferring cash or selling digital assets, spouses may agree to use cryptocurrency to satisfy part of a property settlement if both parties consent and the court approves the agreement where required.
Should I update my crypto estate plan after a divorce?Yes. After a divorce, review your wallet access instructions, beneficiary designations, and estate planning documents to ensure they reflect your current wishes. Failing to update these documents could create complications for your heirs if something happens to you.
Can we avoid going to court over cryptocurrency?Yes. Many couples resolve cryptocurrency issues through negotiation, mediation, or collaborative divorce instead of litigation. Reaching an agreement outside of court can save time, reduce costs, and give both spouses more control over how digital assets are divided.
Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be considered trading or investment advice. Nothing herein should be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading or investing in cryptocurrencies carries a considerable risk of financial loss. Always conduct due diligence.
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