WSJ: Investigations Indicts Hundreds of Cryptocurrency Projects for Plagiarism, Fraud and Improbable Returns

In a recently published report by the Wall Street Journal, the media giant has revealed that hundreds of cryptocurrency projects embarked on fraudulent activities, improbable returns and plagiarism over the years.

According to the report, WSJ downloaded over 3,291 cryptocurrency white papers from ICOBench.com, Tokendata.io and ICORating.com. During their research, the media giant found damming evidence about fraudulent activities, promises of improbable returns and plagiarism among many others.

Investigation carried out by WSJ which included a detailed analysis of documents excluding duplicate and non-English papers:

“To identify duplicate language, the Journal compared sentences with at least 10 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.”

Furthermore, the investigation revealed that over 16 percent or 513 of the total cryptocurrency whitepapers downloaded are laden with plagiarism, identity theft and promises of implausible returns. That’s not all, 2,000 out of the total 3,291 white papers investigated contained luring sentences like “nothing to lose, guaranteed profit, return on investment, highest return, high return, funds profit, no risk and little risk.”

It is important to note that both federal and state regulators in the U.S have continuously cracked down on cryptocurrency projects with similar language in the past, with many of the offerings issued cease and desist orders while others have been charged for fraud.

Notably, the WSJ conducted forensic investigations to identify fake team members of 343 cryptocurrency projects using reverse image search, and results generated do not provide key data about team members. As a matter of fact, some documents did not list team members at all

It would be recalled that a similar report in August by the WSJ revealed that cryptocurrency price manipulations were largely conducted by organized trading groups using platforms such a Telegram. More so, the WSJ stated that pump and dump groups have seen traders inflate and crash prices of cryptocurrencies this year.