Thailand’s Supreme Court has ruled that bitcoin is property that can be the object of a robbery, upholding a 10-year prison sentence for a man convicted over a forced crypto transfer on Koh Samui in September 2022. The decision, Supreme Court judgment no. 4929/2569 handed down by the full bench, was reported on Wednesday 28 October 2026 by Siam Blockchain, a Thai-language crypto outlet that cites the court’s case-law database, and by crypto.news. Neither report gives the date the judgment was signed.
The defendant had argued that bitcoin is only electronic data with no intrinsic value and no physical form, so it could not be robbed. The judges disagreed. Bitcoin has a market price, can be turned into cash and can be held by a person, they found, which is enough to make it property in Thai law, even though the Bank of Thailand says it is not money.
The order to give back the coins also stands. The defendant must return the 2.480801 BTC taken from the victim or pay 1,878,000 baht, the roughly $50,000 the victim was forced to spend on them in 2022. At about $80,570 per bitcoin at 17:32 UTC on 28 October, those coins are now worth close to $200,000, about four times the $50,000 the victim paid for them.
Why Thailand’s Supreme Court treats bitcoin as property
According to Siam Blockchain’s summary of the judgment, the court started from two articles of the Civil and Commercial Code. Section 137 defines property as a tangible object; Section 138 widens the notion to intangible things that can have a price and can be possessed. The question was whether a bitcoin balance fits the second definition.
To answer it, the judges used the 2018 Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses, which describes a cryptocurrency as a unit of electronic data created on a system to serve as a medium of exchange, and which places such assets under the supervision of Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission. They also took into account a letter from the Bank of Thailand, as reported by Siam Blockchain: crypto is not legal tender for paying debts and its price is volatile.
None of that, in the court’s reading, removes the value. Bitcoin has a price set by the market, with reference prices published on sites such as CoinMarketCap. It can be sold for cash when a buyer exists. And members of the public can actually hold it, which in practice means controlling the private key behind a wallet. A thing that has a price and can be possessed is property under Section 138, so a person who takes it by violence commits robbery. The Siam Blockchain report renders the court’s conclusion as a single line: cryptocurrency is property that can be the object of the offence of robbery.
The distinction matters. Property and legal tender are two separate legal categories, and the court kept them apart. The ruling does not make bitcoin money in Thailand, does not oblige anyone to accept it and does not change the baht’s status. What changes is narrower: a person who is forced to hand over bitcoin has lost something the criminal law protects. For readers new to how ownership works on the network, our page on bitcoin (BTC) and our guide to private and public keys explain what “holding” a coin means.
The Koh Samui robbery of September 2022
The facts, as relayed from the court record by crypto.news and Siam Blockchain, go back to 15 September 2022. A foreign man, his Russian wife and their young child were confronted by a group of foreign men at a coffee shop on Koh Samui, in Surat Thani province. The victim was punched in the face, the attackers grabbed at his phone, and under that pressure he used $50,000 to buy 2.480801 BTC and sent it to a wallet controlled by one of the attackers. The group then fled. According to the record, the defendant had borrowed the van and booked ferry tickets online for the getaway.
The case was reported at the time. The Nation wrote on 27 September 2022 that a 31-year-old Russian had filed a complaint with Samui police, saying six men had demanded his digital coins at a coffee shop in Taling Ngam on 15 September and called again three days later asking for more. The paper noted that he waited more than ten days to go to the police. Officers had traced the men’s van to a Chon Buri licence plate but found no footage of anyone intimidating him, and said the group might belong to a Russian gang based in Pattaya. Some details in that 2022 account, such as a $3 million figure in its headline, do not match the court record.
A 10-year sentence, and a dispute over how many defendants
Siam Blockchain lists the Penal Code provisions in the conviction: Section 83 on joint principals, Section 309 on coercion, Sections 340 and 340 ter on robbery, including robbery using a vehicle, and Section 391 on assault. The Koh Samui Provincial Court imposed 15 years and cut the term by one third under Section 78, which allows a reduction for mitigating circumstances, leaving 10 years. Siam Blockchain links the reduction to the defendant’s statements in court, although he had pleaded not guilty. The appeal court kept the sentence and the Supreme Court affirmed it.
On the number of people convicted, the reports conflict. Siam Blockchain describes a single defendant, identified only as “Mr A”, and names several other members of the group, from Kazakhstan, Germany and Russia, without saying what became of them. crypto.news and Crypto Briefing also report one man’s sentence. Cryptonomist, by contrast, writes that five foreign nationals each received 10 years, and the French site Journal du Coin repeats that claim without confirming it. We could not read the judgment to settle the point. The detailed accounts of the appeal all concern one convicted man.
Why Thai lawyers doubted crypto could be stolen
Before this ruling, the answer was far from obvious. In a March 2023 analysis of digital asset litigation in Thailand, the law firm Tilleke & Gibbins wrote that the Penal Code offence of theft can only be committed against a “thing”, meaning a physical object, and that taking a digital asset might therefore not count as theft. Thai scholars were divided on the point, the firm said.
The firm also described how the Supreme Court had handled earlier technologies. Taking electronic money and wired telephone signals had been treated as theft; taking computer data and wireless signals had not. Bitcoin sat awkwardly between those precedents.
By anchoring its reasoning in the civil-law definition of property and in the 2018 decree, the full bench appears to move away from that doubt, at least where bitcoin is taken by force. How far the reasoning reaches beyond bitcoin is less settled: the case concerned bitcoin only, and reports differ on whether the court meant its words for other tokens. Cryptonomist calls the decision binding precedent for lower Thai courts, and Journal du Coin says it now ties every Thai court, but neither cites a legal basis. Siam Blockchain more cautiously calls it a precedent that lower courts can cite. We could not confirm a binding effect from a Thai legal source.
Property, not money: the Bank of Thailand’s line holds
For the Thai market, the ruling sits alongside a regulatory frame that has not moved. Exchanges, brokers and dealers are licensed by the Thai SEC under the 2018 decree, as the pending purchase of a local exchange in our report on Bitget’s plan to buy Z.com EX, which still needs Thai SEC approval, shows. The Bank of Thailand still refuses legal-tender status to crypto, and the court quoted that position rather than challenging it.
The practical effect is on the criminal side. A defence built on “it is only data” failed at three levels of court, and the victim’s restitution order survived intact. Prosecutors in future cases of forced transfers have a top-court ruling that says bitcoin can be robbed.
What it changes for victims of wrench attacks
Forced transfers under threat, known as wrench attacks, are rising worldwide. Jameson Lopp’s public list of such cases passed 700 entries this month, as we reported in our piece on the wrench attack list doubling to 702. Thailand has its own share: crypto.news recalls an armed home invasion in Pattaya in early October 2026, in which about $820,000 in crypto was taken, and an assault on a Russian man in Phuket in January 2025 over an alleged crypto debt. Those are separate cases with no ruling yet.
For a victim, the Koh Samui judgment does two things. It confirms that the attackers can be prosecuted for robbery, a heavier charge than coercion alone. And it keeps alive an order to return the coins themselves or their cash value, which matters when the coins have since gained in price. Getting the money back is another matter: the order binds the defendant, not the wallet the bitcoin went to, and nothing in the reports says the coins were traced or frozen.
Our guide on whether stolen crypto can be recovered explains what police, exchanges and courts can and cannot do once coins have left a wallet.
How the UK settled the same question by statute
Thailand reached its answer through a court. The United Kingdom chose a law. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 2 December 2025, says in section 1 that a digital or electronic thing is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither a “thing in possession” nor a “thing in action”, the two traditional categories of English property law.
The two routes end in a similar place: a crypto balance can be owned, so it can be taken from its owner, and courts can order it returned. The Thai ruling, though, was made in a criminal case and rests on the specific wording of Thai codes. It does not create any rule outside Thailand.
What is still unknown
Several points remain open on the evening of 28 October. The date the judgment was issued has not been published in any report we read. The full text, which Siam Blockchain says sits in the Supreme Court’s case-law database, was not available to us. The defendant’s name, the fate of the other men in the group, and whether any of them have been tried are unknown. And as of this evening we found no report of the ruling in the Bangkok Post, Khaosod or other Thai general news sites; all coverage so far comes from crypto media.
The next thing to watch is the publication of the judgment in full, which would settle the number of defendants and show exactly how far the court meant its reasoning to reach.