Litigation & Dispute Resolution

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a per curiam opinion vacating the FTC’s Click-to-Cancel Rule based on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s failure to comply with a procedural requirement in the FTC Act. This means that clients do not have to meet the July 14, 2025, compliance date but should be mindful of continuing state legal requirements as well as any future developments that could change their compliance obligations.

In our previous article titled Fraud Cases: Hong Kong Court’s Jurisdiction on the Grant of Vesting Orders, our team discussed the remedy of vesting orders in providing relief to victims of internet fraud in recovering their assets that have been siphoned away by fraudsters. The case that was discussed in that article, Hypertec Systems Inc v Yifim Ltd (HCA 1308/2021, HCMP 1829/2021, 18 February 2022) was in favour of a more proactive judicial approach – that the court does have jurisdiction to grant a vesting order in favour of the victim in recovering their assets. In Hypertec, the court did grant a vesting order in favour of the victim. However, decisions since the case of Hypertec have taken a different view on whether the court does have jurisdiction to grant a vesting order. The latest one in this continuing line of undulation is Orion Engineered Carbons GmBH v Universall All Limited and ors (HCA 1625/2024, HCMP 210/2025, 30 May 2025). In Orion, the judge decided to adopt the approach that a vesting order should not be granted in favour of the victim, and instead the victim of internet fraud has recourse only to the conventional remedy of a garnishee order in recovering their siphoned assets. In this article, we revisit the state of the law in Hong Kong on vesting orders and the implications in practice to remedies available to victims of fraud in recovery of their assets.

In two separate decisions in April 2025[1], the Hong Kong High Court first refused, but then allowed, an IT company’s application for an interlocutory injunction to enforce post-termination restrictive covenants against its former employee and his newly set-up rival company.