Each claim sought about HK$1.85 million. The District Court can only handle claims of up to HK$3 million.

Chan said she invested with cryptocurrency trading company JPEX after attending seminars held by influencer Joseph Lam Chok and reading his posts on social media advertising the platform as licensed.

Listing JPEX Crypto Asset Platform as the first defendant and Web 3.0 Technical Support – an affiliated company – as the second, the pair are also suing “any persons who carried out or assisted in the scheme”.

Three others, who appear as “holder of wallet address” for three respective accounts on the JPEX platform, were also named as defendants in the legal document.

Felix Chiu King-yin, general manager of Coingaroo, a cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong with ties to JPEX, was named as a defendant.

Chan alleges that Chiu received HK$1.85 million, and that the money was partly converted into 195,499 USDT, a cryptocurrency also known as Tether, in a JPEX wallet.

The plaintiffs said Chan separately made several deposits worth 247,498 USDT to two JPEX wallets between July and August last year.

They found the assets were moved away “within five minutes after each of the deposits was made”, and subsequently transferred to “many other wallets of unknown holders” before they looked into their accounts on September 14 last year.

On top of that, they are also seeking another 226,012 USDT, said to be crypto assets that appeared in the plaintiffs’ JPEX accounts before being converted to other cryptocurrencies without authorisation.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to make an order to trace the lost funds and grant an injunction to move the cryptocurrency to other platforms.

Lawmaker Johnny Ng Kit-chong, who is in contact with a few hundred victims, said 10 of them planned to launch a civil claim against JPEX, but they needed time to assess the cost of litigation and the possible amount that could be recovered. Some had also applied for legal aid.

Ng urged enforcement agencies to speed up the investigation process and freeze the assets they seized to assist the victims’ recovery efforts through civil claims.

Police launched an investigation into JPEX last September after the Security and Futures Commission identified it as an unlicensed virtual asset trading platform.

As of April, police had received 2,265 complaints from alleged victims, and the number of people arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud stood at 11.

Lam, among other social media influencers who helped promote JPEX, was arrested by the force’s commercial crime bureau last September but released soon after.

Technology law specialist Joshua Chu Kiu-wah, who is handling the pair’s claims, said the court’s findings and observations in the civil case could potentially affect the forthcoming criminal proceedings.

“Notably, the findings from the civil proceedings may potentially bolster the parallel criminal investigation against the suspects, underscoring the importance of this multifaceted legal strategy for the victims,” he said.

He encouraged people to consider pursuing civil proceedings to recover their lost assets while waiting for results from the force’s investigation, as police “are unable to return any seized funds without a court order from the civil case”.