How to Sue an Offshore, Foreign, or Anonymous Defendant in California

By Brandon Orewyler | July 2026

The pattern recurs in the matters that reach me, with small variations: a California investor or company is owed real money by a counterparty that turns out to live overseas, operate through a foreign entity, or hide behind a wallet address. The first question is always the same, and it is the right one: can a California court even reach them? Since the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Briskin v. Shopify, Inc. and its application in Gelasio v. Zafar (an appeal I briefed and argued, ending in a unanimous reversal for our client),¹ the answer is yes far more often than offshore defendants expect.

Personal jurisdiction (a court’s authority over the defendant, as distinct from the subject of the dispute) is the offshore defendant’s first and favorite defense. It used to be their best one. This guide walks through the sequence a cross-border case actually follows: whether California can reach the defendant, what contacts make the difference, how to serve process overseas, what to do when the defendant is anonymous, and what winning the jurisdictional fight does and does not get you.

Key Takeaways

• Foreign residence and offshore incorporation are not jurisdictional shields. After Briskin, deliberate dealings with a person the defendant knows is in California count toward jurisdiction.¹
• The contacts that matter are ordinary business conduct. Loan requests, solicitations, in-state personnel, and offers to Californians carried the day in Gelasio; no exotic theory was needed.²
• Service is a solvable logistics problem, not a wall. The Hague Convention, letters rogatory, and court-ordered email service under Rule 4(f)(3) each fit different countries and timelines.³⁴
• Anonymous defendants get named through discovery. Doe pleading plus expedited subpoenas to exchanges and service providers connects wallets to people.⁵
• Jurisdiction is the door, not the case. Plan the merits and collection strategy before you spend a year winning the threshold fight.

Can a California Court Even Reach a Foreign Defendant?

Yes, when the defendant’s own conduct connects it to California. California’s long-arm statute reaches as far as the federal Constitution allows, so the real test is minimum contacts: whether the defendant purposefully directed its activities at California, whether the claims arise out of or relate to those contacts, and whether jurisdiction is reasonable.⁶

Two kinds of jurisdiction matter, and confusing them wastes motions. General jurisdiction lets a court hear any claim against a defendant, but it exists only where a company is “at home” (paradigmatically, its place of incorporation and principal place of business), so a Hong Kong entity is essentially never subject to general jurisdiction in California.⁷ Specific jurisdiction attaches case by case: it covers claims arising from the defendant’s California-directed conduct, and it is where every offshore-defendant fight is actually won or lost.

The law here moved decisively in the plaintiff’s favor in 2025. The Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision in Briskin v. Shopify eliminated the old requirement that an internet defendant single out California specifically (the “differential targeting” rule), holding that contacts with a person the defendant knows is in California count toward jurisdiction even if the defendant’s platform treats every state identically.¹ In Gelasio v. Zafar, decided April 2026, a unanimous panel applied that rule to reverse the dismissal of a California investor’s claims against a UK-resident founder and a Hong Kong entity behind an NFT venture.² The doctrinal story (what Briskin held, the one seam left open, and why the Supreme Court’s May 2026 cert denial in a parallel case leaves it standing) is in this firm’s companion analysis, The Borderless-Internet Defense Just Died in the Ninth Circuit; this guide stays practical.

If your counterparty knew you were in California and dealt with you anyway, you likely have a jurisdictional case worth assessing.

What Contacts Make a Foreign Defendant Suable Here?

The contacts that establish specific jurisdiction over a foreign defendant are ordinary business conduct directed at Californians, not anything exotic. Gelasio is the working checklist: the panel found express aiming on repeated loan requests to an investor the defendants knew was in California, the surreptitious recording of his call while he was in California, a California software engineer and attorney working on the venture, solicitation of California residents to promote the venture in exchange for presale access, and offers to sell to Californians.²

One warning that saves clients money: the contacts must be the defendant’s, not yours. A plaintiff’s own California residence, standing alone, has never been enough, and the Supreme Court’s Walden v. Fiore rule still polices that line.⁸ The jurisdictional analysis starts with what the defendant did toward California, and a pleading built on anything else invites dismissal.

What If the Defendant Hides Behind a Website?

A website alone rarely decides the question, but how interactive the site is still shapes the argument. The classic framework is the Zippo sliding scale: passive sites that just post information sit at one end, fully transactional sites that do business with forum residents sit at the other, and interactive sites in between get judged by their actual exchanges with the forum.⁹

After Briskin, the scale matters less than it used to in the Ninth Circuit, because a defendant can no longer win simply by showing its site treats every state identically. The productive question is no longer “how interactive is the platform” but “what did the defendant actually do with the Californians it knew about”: accounts opened, funds accepted, tokens delivered, support provided. Transaction records showing the defendant knowingly did business with California users are worth more than any characterization of the website’s architecture.

Discovery aimed at what the defendant knew about its California users beats argument about how its website works.

What If No Single State Has Jurisdiction? (Rule 4(k)(2))

Federal claims carry a backstop many practitioners forget: Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(2), the federal long-arm rule. For a claim arising under federal law, if the foreign defendant is not subject to jurisdiction in any single state’s courts but has sufficient contacts with the United States as a whole, a federal court may exercise jurisdiction.¹⁰

The rule fits crypto fact patterns unusually well. An offshore operation may spread its American contacts thin (some users in California, some in Texas, some in New York) precisely so that no one state’s contacts look substantial. Rule 4(k)(2) aggregates the national picture. For securities-fraud, commodities, and RICO theories against offshore token operations, it belongs in the complaint as an alternative basis whenever the state-specific contacts are contestable.

How Do You Serve a Defendant Overseas?

Service abroad is a logistics problem with three main channels, and choosing the right one early saves months. For defendants in the more than eighty countries that are parties to the Hague Service Convention, service goes through the destination country’s central authority, which effects service under its own law and returns proof.³ It works, but it is slow: several months is normal, and some countries run longer. Some member states also object to alternative channels like postal service, which narrows the options within the treaty.

For non-Hague countries, the traditional route is letters rogatory (a formal request through diplomatic channels), which is slower still. The practical workhorse for internet-era defendants is Federal Rule 4(f)(3): court-ordered alternative service by means not prohibited by international agreement. The Ninth Circuit approved email service under this rule in Rio Properties, Inc. v. Rio International Interlink, and courts have since authorized service by email and other electronic channels on defendants who run online businesses but obscure their physical whereabouts.⁴ For a crypto defendant who is reachable at a support inbox or a known messaging account but nowhere physical, a well-supported 4(f)(3) motion is often the difference between a case that starts this quarter and one that waits a year. (This guide tracks federal-court practice; California state-court service abroad runs through Code of Civil Procedure section 413.10 and the same Convention.)

Timelines above are typical ranges, not commitments; country-specific practice varies and some central authorities run backlogs.

Pick the service channel when you file, not after the jurisdictional fight; the two motions travel better together.

What About Anonymous Crypto Defendants?

You can sue a defendant you cannot yet name. The standard sequence is a Doe complaint (naming the defendant by wallet address or online handle), followed immediately by a motion for expedited discovery to identify them.⁵ The targets of that discovery are the intermediaries that already know who the defendant is: exchanges that performed know-your-customer checks on the wallets that received your funds, hosting and domain providers behind the project’s site, payment processors, and messaging platforms.

Blockchain forensics does the routing work (tracing stolen or transferred funds to an exchange deposit address), and the subpoena does the naming work. Courts grant expedited discovery in this posture on a good-cause showing, under a framework California federal courts have applied to unidentified online defendants since seescandy.com. Two cautions from doing this work: move quickly, because exchanges’ records retention and the defendant’s ability to hop wallets both punish delay; and plan the jurisdictional theory at the same time, because the identification often reveals a foreign defendant and the Briskin analysis above takes over from there. This identification step pairs with asset-recovery strategy (freezing and tracing), which is its own discipline, covered in our California crypto fraud recovery guide.

What Happens After You Win Jurisdiction?

The merits fight begins; the jurisdictional win guarantees nothing about it. The honest proof is Briskin itself: after the en banc court held Shopify subject to jurisdiction in California, the district court dismissed every claim as pleaded in January 2026, all but one with leave to amend.¹¹ Jurisdiction is necessary, never sufficient.

Plan the whole arc before filing. That means a merits theory that survives the pleading standards, a realistic collection picture (offshore defendants often mean offshore assets, and a U.S. judgment must then be enforced where the assets sit), and a budget that treats the jurisdictional motion as the opening battle rather than the war. In Gelasio, the reversal put the case back before the district court to proceed; that is what a jurisdictional win buys, and it is worth buying only when the rest of the case plan holds up.² For the recovery half of the problem (tracing, freezing, and enforcing against crypto assets), see the firm’s work on asset recovery in crypto bankruptcies.

When to Bring in Counsel

The highest-leverage moment is before filing: the jurisdictional theory, the service channel, and the identification strategy set the case’s timeline and cost, and all three are cheaper to get right than to fix. If you are owed money by an offshore or anonymous counterparty, the threshold questions in this guide are answerable on your facts, usually quickly.

Related Resources

• The Borderless-Internet Defense Just Died in the Ninth Circuit
• Crypto Bankruptcy: Recovering Assets After FTX
• How to Recover Stolen Crypto in California
• When the SEC Won’t Act: Private Crypto Litigation
• Smart Contract Enforceability: Code Isn’t Law

This article provides general information for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Jurisdictional and service-of-process practice is fact-specific and country-specific. Consult qualified legal counsel for advice on your specific situation. Attorney Advertising.

Footnotes

1. Briskin v. Shopify, Inc., 135 F.4th 739 (9th Cir. 2025) (en banc). ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Gelasio v. Zafar, No. 24-7277 (9th Cir. Apr. 29, 2026) (mem.) (unpublished memorandum disposition, not precedent per 9th Cir. R. 36-3; reversing dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction). The author briefed and argued the appeal for the plaintiff-appellant. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters, Nov. 15, 1965, 20 U.S.T. 361 (Hague Service Convention); 84 contracting parties per the HCCH status table (mirrored July 19, 2026); channel objections vary by state. ↩ ↩²

4. Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(f)(3); Rio Properties, Inc. v. Rio Int’l Interlink, 284 F.3d 1007 (9th Cir. 2002) (approving email service on a foreign online business). ↩ ↩²

5. Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(d)(1) (discovery before the Rule 26(f) conference by court order); Semitool, Inc. v. Tokyo Electron America, Inc., 208 F.R.D. 273 (N.D. Cal. 2002) (good-cause standard for expedited discovery); Columbia Insurance Co. v. seescandy.com, 185 F.R.D. 573 (N.D. Cal. 1999) (framework for identifying Doe defendants through early discovery so they may be named and served). ↩ ↩²

6. Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 410.10; Schwarzenegger v. Fred Martin Motor Co., 374 F.3d 797 (9th Cir. 2004) (three-part specific-jurisdiction test). ↩

7. Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U.S. 117, 137-39 (2014). ↩

8. Walden v. Fiore, 571 U.S. 277 (2014). ↩

9. Zippo Mfg. Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, Inc., 952 F. Supp. 1119 (W.D. Pa. 1997). ↩

10. Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(k)(2). ↩

11. Briskin v. Shopify, Inc., No. 21-cv-06269-PJH, 2026 WL 161441 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 21, 2026) (on remand, dismissing all claims as pleaded under Rule 12(b)(6), all but one with leave to amend, while rejecting several other defense grounds). ↩