Looking through the latest documents from the case on DocketBird, it is clear to see that the plaintiff’s lead counsel Hung Ta, has tried hard to stay in the lead even after his plaintiff Arman Anvari excused himself from the case. However, in a case that has failed time and time again to gain any type of traction in gathering enough plaintiffs to justify continued litigation, paired with a clear lack of damages for any such plaintiffs, one must wonder why the lawyers and plaintiffs continue on?

Though the plaintiffs and their lawyers claim this is about Tezos being sold as a security, it seems there may be much more to this story than lead counsel would have you believe. It could be that it’s not about Tezos being labeled a security at all, and instead, a more direct way for the plaintiffs to get their donation back from the Tezos Foundation. But if the value of Tezos has gone up, then why wouldn’t they just sell their tokens and move on?

The answer may lie below, in a Telegram group for Tezos users who have lost/forgotten their passwords; the same group that Hung Ta law has been actively recruiting plaintiffs for their class-action case against Tezos.

Active soliciting by Hung Ta law in a Telegram group for XTZ Recovery due to lost passwords

As we can see in the message posted above, a lawyer (Angus Ni) from Hung Ta law, claims to have been given the name of the room by a current client. They also claim to be prosecuting the main Tezos class action and looking to add plaintiffs to the litigation. Why is this important?

1 — If a current client told them of the XTZRecovery Telegram group, that means Hung Ta law is likely already using someone as a plaintiff in the litigation for class action from this room (and therefore someone who lost their password) since that is the only case they have relating to Tezos.

2 — Users who have lost their passwords have a direct benefit in seeing Tezos classified as a security (whether they believe it was sold as one or not) in order to see their donations returned.

3 — Users who have lost their passwords are not typical of the average Tezos contributor for several reasons. Primarily, they are not able to claim their tokens and therefore may feel harmed despite the fact that the harm is not caused by Tezos (instead by them forgetting/losing password). Secondly, because in order to participate in a class, the plaintiffs must be representative of said class, and since there are only 199 listed people in the Telegram group, the folks in the room clearly do not represent the average Tezos contributor.

It remains unclear whether Hung Ta’s practice of recruiting in this selective group is appropriate, given that the messages posted in the group indicate that users who lost their passwords should join a class-action about Tezos being considered a security as a last-resort to getting their donations back (since they can’t claim them due to having lost their passwords):