Thailand's Supreme Court has ruled that Bitcoin is property under the law, in a full-bench judgment that upholds a 10-year prison sentence for a man who helped carry out a robbery in which a tourist on Koh Samui was forced to transfer $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to his attackers.
The judgment, numbered 4929/2569, settles the argument at the heart of the case: that Bitcoin, because it exists only as electronic data and is not legal tender in Thailand, has no value of its own and so cannot be property that is stolen or taken by robbery. The full bench rejected that argument. Bitcoin, the court held, has a measurable market value, it can be owned and held by an individual, it can be transferred, and it can be exchanged for cash when a buyer is available. A victim who is forced to hand it over has lost property, the judges found, and the fact that the money was changed into Bitcoin before it was taken does not make the loss disappear.
The court reached that conclusion through Sections 137 and 138 of Thailand's Civil and Commercial Code, which cover property and extend to intangible things that have value and can be possessed, and through the country's 2018 Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses, which defines cryptocurrency as electronic data created on a digital network for use as a medium of exchange. The judges also noted the Bank of Thailand's position that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender and their prices can swing sharply. That, the court held, is a separate question from whether Bitcoin is property. The ruling does not make Bitcoin money in Thailand, and no shop must accept it. What it does is place Bitcoin inside the protection of the criminal law on property offences, and as a full-bench decision it is the precedent lower courts in Thailand will follow in similar cases.
The case began on September 15, 2022, at a coffee shop in the Taling Ngam area of Koh Samui, where a Russian man had gone to meet his wife. According to the court record, five foreign men confronted the couple. The men made threatening statements showing they knew the family's movements, and they raised the safety of the couple's young child. The confrontation turned physical: the victim was punched in the face and in the ear, and the men tried to seize his phone.
Under that pressure, the victim used his phone to convert $50,000 — about 1.878 million baht at the time — into 2.480801 Bitcoin, and transferred the cryptocurrency to a wallet controlled by one of the attackers. Police reporting at the time said the gang had demanded $3 million in all, and that one man stayed behind after the transfer to press the demand for more. The Bitcoin taken that day, worth $50,000 in September 2022, would be worth roughly four times as much at today's prices, a measure of how much turned on the question of whether it counted as property at all.
The robbery, the court found, was planned. The group had arranged a rented van, motorcycles and resort accommodation, and the convicted defendant had helped coordinate the group's transport and accommodation on the island. After the transfer, he helped arrange the ferry tickets the group used to leave Koh Samui. Prosecutors charged him under several provisions of the Criminal Code, including joint robbery, coercion and assault committed together with others.
The trial court convicted him and sentenced him to 15 years in prison, a term that reflected the use of vehicles to carry out the robbery and make the escape. That sentence was then reduced by one-third, to 10 years, after the court took into account the evidence and cooperation the defendant had provided during the proceedings. The court also ordered that the stolen Bitcoin be returned to the victim, or that compensation of 1.878 million baht be paid instead. The regional court of appeal upheld both the conviction and the sentence, and the case went to the Supreme Court on the single legal question of what Bitcoin is in law.
In its final ruling, the Supreme Court found the conviction soundly based. The judges pointed to the consistent testimony of the victim, his wife and other witnesses, to photographic evidence, and to the records of the Bitcoin transfer itself. The transfer, they held, was made because of threats and physical violence, and there was no basis for treating it as voluntary. The defence challenge was dismissed, and the 10-year sentence and the order to return the Bitcoin or pay the compensation stand.
The judgment also speaks to a problem that has followed cryptocurrency as it has spread: the violent robbery of people believed to hold it. Thailand has investigated a series of such attacks in recent years, in which victims were threatened or assaulted and forced to move digital assets under coercion. In each of those cases the same legal question was waiting underneath the facts — whether what was taken was property the law recognises. The full bench has now answered that question for Thailand in terms that leave little room for argument: value that can be measured, owned and exchanged is property, whatever form it takes.
Thailand is not the only country whose courts have had to answer. South Korea's Supreme Court has treated Bitcoin as an asset with economic value that can be seized by the state, in rulings stretching back to 2018, and the United Kingdom has put the property status of digital assets into legislation. Whether stolen cryptocurrency counts as property is a live question in many jurisdictions, and for American holders it is the same question their own courts confront when crypto is taken by fraud or force: does the criminal law treat the loss as the loss of property? No American court or party is involved in the Thai case, and the ruling binds no one outside Thailand. Its weight is as one more decision, from one of Asia's highest courts, holding that the answer is yes.
What the ruling does not settle is the fate of the other men who carried out the robbery. Reporting from the time said most of the gang fled Thailand and were made the subject of international arrest notices, and no update on their cases has been published alongside the judgment. Nor is it known whether the Bitcoin or the compensation has in fact been paid. What is settled is the sentence and the principle beneath it: the 10 years stand, and in Thailand Bitcoin is property, and taking it by force is robbery.
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