Onchain investigator ZachXBT published one of the most direct criticisms of Gerstein Harrow LLP's litigation strategy on May 1, describing the firm as "a predatory US law firm with a strategy that is pure evil" and noting that the firm used his own cybersecurity research of crypto hacking incidents to justify its claims. "Whenever there's a new Lazarus Group victim after an exploit and crypto assets get frozen, these clowns come in and say they have a claim for an alleged DPRK victim from 26 years ago that has zero relation to crypto or exploits or hacks," ZachXBT wrote. The pattern ZachXBT identified is consistent across multiple incidents: Gerstein Harrow has filed similar claims following the Harmony protocol hack, the Bybit exchange exploit, the Kelp DAO exploit, and now against Tether's frozen Iranian stablecoin holdings. In each case, the firm attempts to attach its clients' existing terrorism judgments to recently frozen crypto assets, regardless of whether those assets have any connection to the underlying terrorism claims or to the clients who hold the judgments.

The legal mechanism the firm is using is not fabricated — holders of terrorism judgments against state actors do have legal standing to pursue assets connected to those states in US courts, and OFAC designations create attachment opportunities that did not previously exist in traditional finance. The ethical criticism is about proportionality and competing claims rather than legal validity: when a pool of frozen assets exists because hackers stole from DeFi users or sanctions enforcement identified Iranian state funds, the people most directly harmed — hack victims waiting for recovery, or the US government's sanctions enforcement objectives — have a more proximate claim to those funds than plaintiffs holding decades-old terrorism judgments that predate cryptocurrency by years. ZachXBT's frustration reflects the broader community view that Gerstein Harrow is using the complexity of cross-border crypto enforcement as an arbitrage opportunity, inserting itself into recovery processes where it has no substantive connection to the underlying harm.