Meet the Boneheads

The alleged 'Boneheads' NFT scam saw buyers lose millions. How one man traced the sale to a flashy couple near Belleville, Ont.

- RICHARD WARNICA

Sohaib Habib knew he had a good case. His facts were solid. The evidence, of a massive and outlandish scam based in a small Ontario beach town, was overwhelming. But still, he was nervous. Truth is, he'd never done this before. He was a patent lawyer, not a litigator. Even then, he only had two years at the bar. So what was he doing here, alone in court, asking for the unprecedented? "I'll be honest with you, this was my first time filing something by myself," Habib said recently. "I knew we were right. I knew we had done our work. I knew the case was iron tight."

What Habib was seeking that day was something never before granted by a Canadian judge. He was asking the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to allow him and his client, Ottawa's Taylan McRae-Yu, to serve a group of defendants not just by knocking on their doors but by dropping custom-designed nonfungible tokens (NFTs) into their digital wallets. By tracking the movement of those NFTS, Habib was arguing, they could prove the defendants, wherever they might be, had been suitably served. And by doing that, Habib believed, they could blow the lid off a multimillion-dollar hustle that made waves across the digital world in 2021.

For Habib and McRae-Yu, the stakes were high. The motion was the culmination of months of unpaid detective work. The two had spent hundreds of hours tracing transactions between cryptocurrency wallets, searching corporate records, and scouring TikTok and Instagram to pinpoint the culprits. They believed they had at least two of them nailed, a flashy young couple from the upscale countryside outside Belleville, Ont., with a taste for high-end cars, luxury travel and small dogs. Now they just had to prove it.