Crypto Investigations and Expert Testimony

Roundtable Discussion With Digital Assets Investigators

Digital asset disputes now touch every corner of the globe. As crypto litigation and enforcement activity has evolved, there’s been an increasing need for investigators and testifying experts who can navigate the complexities and explain blockchain findings clearly to counsel and courts. In this Q&A, five of FTI Technology’s Blockchain and Digital Assets testifying experts, Steven S. McNew, Jeremy Sheridan, Erik Min, Jimmy Johnson and Jonathan Graessle, share their experiences providing guidance across dozens of investigations and litigations.

Crypto Investigations Make Up a Highly Specialized Area of Work. How Did You Get Started in This Space?

McNew: My entire career has been in emerging technologies and I spotted digital assets early on as a transformative category. I leaned into an opportunity to work on one of the first crypto matters to reach the courts, which led to being accepted as an expert. Generally speaking, it came down to a combination of taking a genuine interest in the technology, learning it deeply, building enough experience to form real opinions and earning the certifications and training that give a court confidence in my credentials.

Sheridan: I spent nearly 30 years in state and federal law enforcement. In those roles, I testified in criminal proceedings numerous times and appeared as a digital asset expert witness before the U.S. Congress on three occasions. I’ve since been accepted as an expert witness in U.S. federal court, in the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center, and in the Singapore International Commercial Court. My designation is grounded in my experience as a financial crime and digital asset investigator, along with my training, education and certifications.

Johnson: My path started with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where I served as a supervisory special agent leading complex investigations into financial fraud, cybercrime and cryptocurrency-related criminal activity. Over my career, I testified before federal grand juries and authored sworn affidavits, criminal complaints and search and seizure warrants that were reviewed and accepted by federal judges. After the FBI, I served as a senior investigator at a cryptocurrency exchange, where I investigated sophisticated account compromise and fraud matters, working closely with legal, security and engineering teams. That combination of law enforcement, cryptocurrency exchange and consulting experience provided a strong foundation for my work at FTI Technology, where I now serve as a testifying expert on complex blockchain investigations, digital asset tracing, regulatory matters and cryptocurrency disputes.

Graessle: I got started in the space while I was still practicing law, handling federal criminal and civil cases, including fraud and financial litigations. I became fascinated by this emerging technology. I started professionally in the cryptocurrency space largely handling financial fraud and crypto-specific due diligence matters. But as a former litigator, investigations and working in an expert support role proved to be a natural fit.

Min: My experience started in the digital forensics space investigating theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, as well as cyber-related incident response investigations. It was a natural progression to leverage my investigative skills to support an emerging space in cryptocurrency and blockchain. I avidly researched, studied and prepared by taking training and certifications, as well as obtaining practical knowledge performing hundreds of internal and expert investigations involving digital assets and blockchain technologies. I’ve been designated as an expert witness in civil proceedings in state circuit court as well as criminal proceedings in the U.S. District Court of Northern California.

Within the Digital Assets Space, What Types of Cases Are You Primarily Focused On?

Min: Across our team, we support a wide variety of investigations and other matters, wherever forensic and technical experience with blockchain technology are needed. A lot of my work focuses on connecting evidentiary findings from respective investigative workstreams focused on digital forensics, digital asset tracing and source code analysis for blockchain-based decentralized applications.

In one matter, I provided guidance and side-by-side support for a client handling a receivership to manage disposition of millions in digital assets during an ownership dispute. Working closely with our client and the FBI, our team ensured it was safely and legally moved to a cold wallet held in a safety deposit box belonging to the receivership attorney, for safekeeping until the court case concluded. Later, we oversaw movement of the funds to a new digital assets exchange account held by the receiver, and conversion of a portion of the assets to cash to enable the defendant to pay the fee to the plaintiff, per court order. This required careful and strategic transaction management to convert the remaining cryptocurrency back to the original coin, so that it could be disposed of according to the court’s instructions, without triggering market disruptions.

Graessle: I’m currently focused on investigations and expert witness support, often in cases requiring on-chain expertise, including tracing funds and attributing wallets. However, having a breadth of cryptocurrency experience is critical as many crypto matters also involve issues such as licensing, valuations or market dynamics. Much of my work supports disputes involving multiple cryptocurrency related topics.

Johnson: I primarily work on complex litigation and investigative matters involving blockchain technology, cryptocurrency transactions and digital assets. My work includes forensic tracing of stolen or disputed assets, expert witness support, regulatory and compliance investigations, cryptocurrency exchange investigations, digital asset valuation disputes and preparing expert reports for civil, criminal and arbitration proceedings. Our role is to combine investigative experience, forensic analysis and technical expertise to help counsel and courts understand highly complex issues.

What Do People Tend to Find Most Surprising About This Kind of Work?

McNew: How global the issues and participants really are is often underappreciated. We’ve worked on matters involving startups, major financial institutions, celebrities and other high profile parties. The need for experts spans the full spectrum of the types of issues being investigated or disputed, everywhere around the world. The work isn’t confined to one jurisdiction or one type of client the way traditional litigation and testifying work is often considered to be.

Sheridan: Time and again, we come across opposing parties whose expertise is very narrow, which underscores the reality that effective work in this space requires exposure to and experience in a vast variety of disciplines. Testifying in digital asset investigations requires knowledge of technology, law, finance and criminology all at once. Each of those fields runs deep on their own, so every testifying engagement is genuinely complex and demands a broad, layered level of expertise that is hard to find.

Min: Not every case involves a smoking gun. So often, we see parties looking for that single piece of evidence that will crack the case. However, in most matters, especially when dealing with the complex world of digital assets, it takes time, intuition and technical understanding to find and make sense of a large body of evidence.

Graessle: How open and transparent cryptocurrency transactions are. The public perception is that crypto is anonymous or untraceable. However, it is pseudonymous, and the blockchain maintains an immutable, public record of every transaction. Tracing the flow of funds on-chain is often easier than with traditional financial investigations where third parties, like banks, hold records that are not openly available.

What’s Unique About FTI Technology’s Team?

McNew: Our practitioner-level experience and the expertise across the broader support team are significant advantages and differentiators. We have a cross-section of complementary specialties by industry and nuance, and experience investigating and testifying in some of the highest-profile digital asset cases, including precedent-setting decisions in both domestic and international courts. Our combined backgrounds in law enforcement, regulatory enforcement, finance, technology and law enable us to approach cases from multiple angles and deliver analysis that’s clear, defensible and grounded in real-world experience. That credibility matters when a case may hinge on how an investigator can follow a complex trail of data or how clearly an expert can explain complex issues to a judge or jury.

What’s an Example From a Recent Matter Where Technical Depth Made the Difference?

Sheridan: Our team was engaged to draw a distinction within a smart contract’s code between withdrawals and borrows on an exchange’s platform. I served as the testifying expert to explain our findings in court.

In decentralized environments, there’s back-end code that specifies different transaction types. For example, a “1” in the code might indicate a withdrawal, while a “0” could indicate either a withdrawal or a borrow. Our technical experts analyze the code to identify those signifiers and validate how they map to specific actions, giving clients — and the court — a clear picture of what actually took place within a given account.

In cases like this one, where the legal team needs to draw a definitive line between two different types of activity, additional code review is often required. FTI Technology has the capability to conduct that deeper code analysis, uncovering and verifying the specific logic tied to a single type of action, like a withdrawal versus a borrow. From there, we provide counsel with detailed technical reports demonstrating those findings — surfacing evidence of activity that might otherwise have gone unknown or only partially understood.

For more information about FTI Technology’s expert-led digital assets investigations and expert witness support, visit here.