Guardianship Handoff Failure in Cryptoasset Cybercrime: Regulatory Discontinuity, Digital Financial Victimisation, and Cross-Border Crime Prevention

Cyber-enabled fraud can move victim funds from social or messaging platforms into banks, virtual-asset service providers, self-hosted wallets, cross-chain services and offshore venues before a report becomes effective preservation or restraint. This article asks why prevention and recovery can fail even when formally capable guardians exist at successive institutional nodes. It develops guardianship handoff failure (GHF) as a transition-level criminological mechanism: a handoff fails when a relevant downstream guardian exists or can lawfully be activated, but the information, attribution, legally usable authority or intervention capacity needed for that guardian’s function is not preserved, transmitted, recognised or activated within the relevant temporal window. GHF is distinguished from the absence of guardianship, substantive gaps in legal power and lawful non-intervention. Using a structured comparative socio-legal design and a crime-script-informed sequence, the study examines seven recurrent handoff zones in Hong Kong and South Korea to a legal cut-off of 30 September 2026. The analysis identifies four non-exclusive discontinuities—observability, attribution, authority and intervention—and derives four propositions for later empirical testing. The comparison illustrates conditions consistent with the proposition that denser regulatory coverage may increase coordination dependence, without estimating causal effects on victim loss or recovery. A victim-centred architecture is proposed that separates evidence preservation, temporary restriction, public restraint, adjudication and return while emphasising accessible reporting, provenance, bounded escalation, correction and protection against secondary victimisation.