Robot lawyer platform DoNotPay is expanding to cryptocurrency businesses, offering a suite of services to automate the drafting and sending of legal letters to crypto exchanges.
Joshua Browder, DoNotPay’s founder, started the chatbot subscription service after moving to the U.S. from England and receiving a number of parking tickets, he said.
“I was writing the same letter over and over and thought, ‘This could so easily be automated,’” he said. “I started it by accident because I’m a bad driver [but] people were writing in with all the other problems they had. Lawyers were charging hundreds of dollars an hour.”
Over the past five years, the service offered letters for securing bank fee refunds, canceling subscriptions and suing robocallers. The expansion to crypto perhaps reflects the mainstreaming of digital assets, where Robinhood natives seize on the latest crypto coin of the moment with reckless abandon.
DoNotPay has now developed five products designed to send letters to crypto exchanges for a variety of purposes, such as asking exchanges to unfreeze funds. The service also plans to accept bitcoin and ether as payment starting on June 1.
“The first [form] is for getting funds frozen and unfrozen much more quickly, so we compiled all the laws around the freezing and unfreezing of funds, and we force the exchange to back up [their policies],” he said.
Another service will track funds stolen through hacks and notify exchanges if the stolen funds land in an exchange wallet.
Other services include reporting pump-and-dump schemes to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filing exchange disputes and tracking airdrops.
“I think these big companies know the consumers are powerless if the disputes are small so we want to be the person that comes in [and helps],” Browder said.
DoNotPay is limited to providing legal letters for small claims, he said. It won’t replace the services of an actual lawyer with bigger issues.
“Our limitation is we don’t have people go into the courtroom, so any sort of dispute over $10,000 or more we could never do,” he said.