The fake publications were spread through a news outlet that posed as the popular Chinese news website Coinbull, with the scammers claiming that Wright made a transfer of 50,000 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallets, suggesting that he really is the real creator of BTC.
Craig Wright has self-proclaimed that he is the true Satoshi Nakamoto for many years now, although he could have easily proven his identity by moving some of the first mined bitcoins form his wallets. He is known for being the creator of Bitcoin SV, which resulted from a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) that took place in November of last year.
After the transaction was made, the scammers then claimed that Binance would once again list Bitcoin SV on its platform and post an apology tweet for removing the cryptocurrency. BSV was delisted from the Binance exchange in April, after it was noticed that Wright couldn’t handle criticism too well. Wright apparently responds to online criticism by offering a reward of $5,000 to the whoever doxed his detractors.
Seems someone did it purposely just around the same time BSV pumped just an hour ago.
Completely fake news but “real enough” to trick many Chinese retails pic.twitter.com/qiWtW6Z8bC
— Dovey "Rug the fiat" Wan (hiring) (@DoveyWan) May 29, 2019
The founding partner at Primitive Ventures, Dovey Wan, stated that the scammer’s ruse was a success as “all Chinese crypto media circulate the breaking news via picture as above in WeChat instead of a news link.” Wan also noted that they photoshopped their own information into the same templates of news outlets.
The final result of the fake information was an increase of 70% in Bitcoin SV’s price in the last 24-hour period, reaching a high of $250 before experiencing a slight drop. Another surge was noticed this month after Wright filled a copyright claim on the Bitcoin whitepaper.
From all this attention, Bitcoin SV has increased over 300% in the past 30 days, growing from a price of $50 to $224.7.
Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao contradicted the rumors on social media by responding to a user that asked about the price surge. After Binance’s delisting of BSV, other exchanges such as Kraken and ShapeShift also started dropping the crypto.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1133777712055635968
Coinbull also sent a response to the fake publication on WeChat, stating that it knew of the existence of the “malicious photoshopped image” and cautioned its users “not to trust any rumors and not to spread any rumors.”
Featured Image:The Guardian
