In This Article:
My Ret. Account Servs. v. Alternative Ira Servs., 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 180327 (W.D. Kentucky, NO. 5:19-CV-122-TBR, 10/18/2019) [SDP]
For all of you crypto civil procedure mavens, this opinion offers a nice primer on personal jurisdiction and happens to involve an underlying dispute involving cryptocurrencies held by a trust custodian for individual retirement accounts (“IRAs”.)
The plaintiff Kingdom Services owns a company called Kingdom Trust, a South Dakota company with its principal place of business in Kentucky which is the trust custodian you read about just words away in the preceding paragraph. The defendant is a Delaware LLC with its principal place of business in California. It does business under a bunch of different names including Bitcoin IRA. BitGo Inc., also a defendant, is a Delaware corporation, and it has an affiliate named BitGo trust which is a South Dakota corporation.
Back in early 2018, plaintiff entered into a contract with Bitcoin IRA for use of a technology platform so customers could buy and sell crypto in their IRA. Things went south, and as often ensues when things go south, there was a lawsuit. Here’s the gist:
Before transferring its clients’ assets, Kingdom Trust claims it was required by federal and state law to perform due diligence on BitGo Trust and its relationships with service providers. In response to Kingdom Trust’s delay in executing the transfers, Defendant Concha sent Kingdom Trust a cease and desist letter demanding Kingdom Trust execute the transfers immediately. Kingdom Trust also claims that BitGo Trust encouraged clients to contact South Dakota banking regulators and complain about the delay. According to the Complaint, Defendants continued to contact Kingdom Trust clients and encourage them to transfer their assets to BitGo Trust until the current action was filed in August 2019.
(The lawsuit was previously covered here, if you’re interested in further reading about the allegations.)
Anyway, these allegations are all well and good, but as regular readers of CCM will recall, a Court can’t entertain a lawsuit when it doesn’t have jurisdiction over the parties. And therein, friends, lies the rub. No personal jurisdiction.
The defendants said they had nothing to do with Kentucky, which is where this lawsuit was filed and so moved to dismiss on those grounds. Most states (it may be all, and probably is, but I haven’t done a survey) have statutes that cover personal jurisdiction over non-resident defendants. They are called “long arm” statutes. A federal court in this kind of case — diversity jurisdiction, to be technical — uses the long arm statute of the state where they are located.