A client needed to establish a legally recognised debt of 6.74 Bitcoin and obtain court orders to trace assets across exchanges and wallet providers. No Portuguese court had done this before. The judge described the evidence as irrefutable.
Key evidence tampered with. Local legal team inexperienced with crypto. Opposing party denied the debt, threatened a €5M lawsuit, and initiated parallel proceedings abroad. Wallet addresses unknown — tracing impossible without a court order.
Establish a court-recognised debt denominated in Bitcoin — something no Portuguese family court had done. Create a legal mechanism to compel exchanges and a non-custodial wallet provider to disclose wallet addresses.
The court recognised the debt, ordered wallet address disclosure from five platforms and a non-custodial provider, and ordered seizure and immediate transfer of located funds. Likely the first crypto inventory order in Portuguese family court.
The couple had purchased a property together during the marriage for €2.3 million, funded partly through a bank loan and partly through their own capital. All costs were to be split equally, tracked in a shared Google Sheet maintained by a personal assistant.
The husband's share was to be funded by selling Bitcoin. When the market dropped, the couple agreed he would sell BTC directly to the client at a fixed price. The client covered his share of expenses in fiat. In exchange, she acquired 8.11 BTC, which remained under his control pending transfer. After adjustments, the net amount owed was 6.74 BTC.
When the relationship broke down, the client left the family home and repeatedly asked for the Bitcoin to be delivered. He ignored her. Then, just hours before announcing his intention to divorce, he accessed the shared spreadsheet and restored it to an old version, deleting every record of the Bitcoin transactions — including a cell he had written himself recording that he owed the client 6.74 BTC.
The Portuguese legal system has no established procedural concept of digital forensic evidence in civil courts. Google's native version history — timestamps, user attribution, activity logs — would be sufficient in many jurisdictions. In Portugal, none of this carried automatic weight.
Before any evidence could be prepared, the legal landscape had to be researched: what procedural basis existed for the interim measure, what evidentiary standards applied, how digital records could be presented in a form that a Portuguese family court would accept.
A licensed forensic firm in Portugal was identified and engaged. The firm was briefed on the technical structure of Google Sheets version tracking and scoped to deliver a court-admissible report. The forensic team created a dedicated Google account, accessed the spreadsheet under controlled conditions, and documented the full action history.
The report established:
Two witnesses were prepared: the personal assistant who created and maintained the spreadsheet, and the forensic analyst who could walk the court through the tampering in plain terms. Each was prepared to assume no technical knowledge from the court.
The legal motion had to achieve two things simultaneously: establish a court-recognised debt in Bitcoin, and create a legal mechanism to compel disclosure of wallet addresses from crypto platforms.
The non-custodial wallet provider holds only one key and cannot freeze funds. If the respondent were alerted, he could reconstruct the wallet and move the Bitcoin before any court order took effect. The court was asked to notify the wallet provider first, then notify remaining entities simultaneously.
The Family Court granted the interim inventory order. All 26 facts alleged by the client were proven. The court found:
The judge described the evidence as irrefutable.
This is, to our knowledge, the first successful interim inventory order for cryptocurrency in a Portuguese family court.
It worked because the evidence was built from scratch for a court with no crypto experience. Forensic work was independently verified. Enforcement strategy accounted for the real architecture of custodial and non-custodial platforms. Witnesses presented facts in terms the court could evaluate without technical translation.
The husband's position rested on denial: the debt did not exist, the client's claims were defamatory, and a threatened lawsuit would force her to back down. Once the court recognised the debt and described the evidence as irrefutable, that position collapsed. An extortion claim has no foundation when the underlying obligation is legitimate.
The case was built using forensic analysis of cloud-based documents, Portuguese civil procedural law on interim measures, expert witness testimony, and a custom enforcement strategy designed for the technical architecture of custodial and non-custodial crypto platforms.
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