Crypto lawyer Irina Heaver on death threats, lawsuit predictions: Hall of Flame
“I live in Switzerland. I have guns at home. Anybody who shows up at my home with violent intentions risks being literally shot at,” Heaver warns altcoiners who send her death threats online.
Speaking to Magazine, Heaver explains that she blames memecoin founders for fueling the fiery users on Crypto Twitter.
“I mean, there’s so much responsibility on these community leaders and altcoin leaders. They’re egging on their followers to send threats and intimidate people,” Heaver declares.
As a prominent crypto lawyer in Dubai and Switzerland, Heaver has 41,200 followers — more than your average lawyer. Though not as famous as your Buterins and Heilperns, it’s still fairly impressive considering she has a care-free attitude toward it:
“If somehow they cancel me, I will continue posting on LinkedIn because I have a huge following on LinkedIn.”
Heaver is a self-proclaimed Bitcoin maxi who speaks at crypto conferences all over the world. She says that most of the threats she gets online are because she warns people to steer clear of dodgy altcoins.
When a token founder gets sued or faces legal action, she unpacks the legal jargon and spills the tea to her followers.
Most recently, she was a target of the Hex community after founder Richard Heart was hit with a lawsuit.
“I had people sending death threats against my children, saying they know which kindergarten they go to,” she says.
Heaver states she works with law enforcement to bust scammy memecoins projects.
Before jumping into crypto in 2016, Heaver worked as a lawyer in the oil and gas industry for 13 years.
“I was general counsel of the largest shipping group in the world, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t sit in the boardroom listening to that corporate bullshit.“
Heaver explains that her colleagues couldn’t believe she ditched her well-paying lawyer gig to work in the crypto industry. She recalls them telling her it was just filled with “money launderers and drug dealers.”
What led to Heaver’s Twitter fame?
Heaver brought her old Twitter account back to life around a year ago, even though she has had it for almost a decade.
“In July last year, I started posting for the first time, although my Twitter account is very old. I joined in 2014.”
“I made a conscious decision to post once a day,” Heaver says, despite not expecting to rack up any followers.
She explains that while she takes her crypto work with “governments in the Middle East and Eastern Europe” very seriously, Twitter is just a bit of fun for her.
She figures that’s probably why online threats aimed at her make the senders so furious — she just couldn’t give a damn.
What type of content do you do?
Heaver believes the crypto community gets way more pumped up for fun and easygoing content than all the heavy-duty stuff.
“Every time I post something very meaningful and very intelligent about the laws and very meaningful analysis, I get two likes. I get a lot more posting fun content and just making jokes and actually being myself.”
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Heaver says her content is pretty chill, and she likes to give insights into her interesting life, whether shooting a rifle or hiking in Switzerland.
But every so often, she will let you know about the latest person or government she has orange-pilled.
What type of content do you like?
Heaver reveals that her Twitter feed is a blend of “Bitcoin-only” accounts and various political commentators.
She explains that she finds political commentary more interesting than tracking crypto prices. She asserts that in the grand scheme of things, broader political decisions hold greater significance than coins pumping 1,000x.
“I follow a lot of political commentary. That actually interests me more than which coin is doing what, because it doesn’t matter which coin does what on the biggest scale of things. What matters is the political direction.”
She particularly enjoys content from Swan Bitcoin’s Cory Klippsten, Bitcoin Archive and the Elon Musk (Parody) account.
Heaver’s predictions for major exchanges
As for the ongoing lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase brought forth by the SEC, Heaver anticipates both “will settle without acknowledging any sort of wrongdoing on their part, and the SEC will leave them alone.”
Heaver reveals this stems from her “inside knowledge” of how the SEC operates, gained during her time in the oil and gas industry.
She recalls a specific Swiss company she worked with, engaged in business in the Middle East, that drew the attention of U.S. regulators.
Heaver explains that “the SEC and DOJ decided that they have jurisdiction over this company” and basically chased them for seven years.
The outcome was a $250 million settlement and the company denying any fault. Heaver emphasizes that it was a pretty sweet payday for regulators:
“That’s how they get their budgets. That’s how they get the money to pay the salaries and God knows what on the Christmas bonuses.”
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
Politics latest: Starmer responds to report suggesting tax rises needed
Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
With a sentencing hearing scheduled in a matter of weeks, Roman Storm is potentially looking at five years in jail for running an unlicensed money transmitting service.
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