A recent study published in the Wall Street Journal on December 27 found that hundreds of cryptocurrency projectsshow signs of fraudulent activity and plagiarism.
During the investigation, WSJ staff downloaded whitepapers 3291 cryptocurrency projects that announced an ICO on their websites. After that, they analyzed the documents, immediately eliminating duplicates and non-English versions.
To identify a duplicate, the researchers comparedsentences with at least ten unique words with each sentence from a different white paper. They then read and analyzed about 10,000 sentences that appeared repeatedly among 3,291 documents. Then the researchers compared the announced dates of the ICO in order to find out which of the documents containing the offer was published before everyone else, and excluded it from their database.
According to employees, about 16% – 513 white papers showed clear signs of plagiarism, false promises, and identity theft.
White papers of more than 2,000 projects contained enticing phrases like “no losses,” “guaranteed profits,” “high profits,” “without the slightest risk.”
US State and Federal Regulatorspay close attention to ICOs, whose representatives spoke a similar language, issuing orders prohibiting the continuation of illegal actions, or suing alleged criminals.
In August, the Wall Street Journal published an articleAccording to which, manipulation of the prices of cryptocurrencies is mainly carried out by “organized trading groups” that use services like Telegram. WSJ journalists suggest that coordinated pump-and-dump schemes are responsible for the collapse in digital asset values this year.
Based on materialscointelegraph.com
