More than a million people and businesses may be owed money after the collapse of the cryptocurrency giant FTX, according to reports.
There are also fresh fears that FTX may have been hacked with the loss of millions of dollars.
In the UK, crypto assets are largely unregulated with little protection for consumers but 6.7m Brits own or have invested in crypto assets.
This equates to one in ten of the entire UK population.
In September, according to a BBC report, financial watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned that FTX may be providing financial services or products in the UK without its authorisation.
It said bluntly: “You are unlikely to get your money back if things go wrong.”
It now has a page dealing with the FTX liquidation. Again, the message is that options for those who’ve invested in it are limited.
Daniel Seely, financial services associate for law firm Freeths, told the BBC: “The short answer is that there isn’t much recourse available.”
With a few exceptions, crypto assets fall largely outside the scope of regulators and watchdogs – for example, the Financial Ombudsman Service – and so consumers “don’t have a clear right to recourse in the same way they may with other products”.