According to the latest report published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dated 27th December, various cryptocurrency project offerings are indulged into fraudulent activities leading to improbable return and plagiarism issues.
Further, to substantiate the result of such research, the WSJ downloaded “white papers” of 3,291 cryptocurrency projects that declared an initial coin offering (ICO) from three different websites such as ICOBench.com, Tokendata.io, and ICORating.com.
To explain a white paper in short, it is a document drafted by the company to give adequate information about the company that explains the company’s profile, its position along with their performance strategy, team biography, and technical support with respect to each project taken up by the company. It is also used as a marketing tool for potential investors.
The WSJ post analyzing the ‘white paper’ documents which excluded duplicate and non-English papers gave a statement that: “To identify the duplicate language, the Journal compared sentences with at least ten unique words to every other sentence in other white papers. Reporters then read and reviewed nearly 10,000 sentences appearing more than once among the 3,291 papers analyzed and removed technical and legal sounding language. Then, the Journal compared reported offering dates to determine which document first published any given sentence and excluded those projects from this database.”
It further added that the verification of the documents signifies that approximately 16 percent of the given white paper reflects plagiarism issues, the involvement of theft and fake promises. Almost 70 percent of the white papers consists attractive sentences such as “nothing to lose, guaranteed profit, return on investment, highest return, high return, funds profit, no risk, and little risk,” but no one knows how trustworthy are these companies.
Meanwhile, to monitor and ascertain whether the company’s intention is in favor of public interest or not, various members from the state and federal departments have conducted several inspection strategies with similar language on various offerings and if found many guilty where they have issued a cease and desist orders with charges to the alleged offenders accordingly.
Further, the inspection strategy did not limit itself to only one process, and it extended to various other processes as well. The WSJ team has identified various groups of individuals who were involved in such fraudulent activities and noted that few of the projects had a fake team uploaded on their website to enhance the credibility of the project. To unearth the same, WSJ tried to do a reverse search of photos of the people from around 343 projects, and in cases where there are no sufficient KYC details about the member available, the team has searched through the names which appear in the list of over 1 million people – owned and managed by the U.S. Census Bureau.
