A photo carries one date inside it, the device records another, and the service it passed through logs a third. Each belongs to a different owner, and each owner answers to a different law. That is why serious digital evidence is always correlation — and why serious correlation leaves a judicial paper trail.
The button exists, it's written into the USDT contract, and only Tether can press it. As a rule, the request comes from law enforcement, not the victim. Freezing stops the money, but it doesn't send it back on its own. And everything depends on the funds still being there.
Screenshot, file, timestamp, location: the reader calls all of it "evidence," while the law has a separate name for each one. Five of those names are defined by statute. The rest are forensic vocabulary. Knowing which is which is what separates what you present from what actually holds up.
On August 28 Take-Two went back to court: it sought a second subpoena to Discord with the target list under seal, and the same day withdrew its application against Google. One judge granted the new subpoena on August 31. Another had asked, days earlier, how the personas were identified. The question went unanswered.
Section 512(h) of the DMCA hands over a user's identity with no lawsuit and no judge. Brazil chose the opposite path and never built an equivalent. The gap between the two models is being measured right now, at the Supreme Court.
Three subpoenas filed in New York rely on a DMCA provision that requires no lawsuit and no judge. What they ask for goes well beyond the persona that signed the GTA VI leak.
In July, the STJ held that banks are not automatically liable for the fake call-center scam. Nine months earlier, the same panel had ruled against a bank. The contradiction is only apparent — what shifted was not the doctrine, but the burden of proof.
An operation by the Civil Police of Pernambuco lays bare what prevention guides rarely show: the fake investment scheme isn't a lone fraudster improvising. It's a structure with an office, a script and a monthly target.
Those who move illicit money in crypto tend to confuse pseudonymity with invisibility. They are not the same thing, and the difference surfaces at precisely the moment they need to turn it into spendable money.
What determines whether a case has anywhere to go is rarely what happens the following week. It's what gets preserved — or unwittingly destroyed — in the first hours, by someone who doesn't yet know they'll need it.
A bureau tells you what someone is today. An investigation tells you what they did, with whom, and how it can be proven. The difference isn't one of depth — it's one of kind.
The scam doesn't convince the victim all at once. It walks them through six stages, each designed to make the next one seem reasonable. Understanding the funnel is what makes it possible to interrupt before the last stage.