HFT giant Virtu has been the target of an apparent clone scam, using its likeness to attract possible investors. The company is threatening legal action and has already approached the authorities about the matter. The promotional matrial for the “coin” in question, Virt, is so bizarre it almost looks like a parody of the current state of the market or the result of an ICO whitepaper writing AI gone rogue.
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Virtu Clone Scam
Virtu Financial (NASDAQ:VIRT), one of the largest high-frequency trading firms on Wall Street, has issued a warning to the public on Friday against Virtcoin, explaining it has no relationship, connection, or affiliation to the company and its officers and directors. Additionally, “Virtu has notified the appropriate authorities and intends to commence all necessary legal actions to defend itself from any attempt to infringe on Virtu’s copyrights, trademarks and intellectual property.”
This came after a fake press release was sent out by Virt on Wednesday using images of the Virtu team and trying to link the two entities. The misleading press release even claimed that “Douglas Cifu, Virtu Financial’s chief executive, told Wall Street recently that the company is going to issue the upcoming token VIRT for the trading desk.”
Deep Concern and Support
Judging by the website and whitepaper of the project, Virt appears to be either run by a bunch of Chinese scammers that don’t know basic English and are reliant on auto-translation software, or an entity that is pretending to be illiterate for some reason. For example, the Virt whitepaper opens with this word soup: “Encrypted digital currency is a form of value data based on block chain underlying technology. At present, the most outstanding ones are bitcoin, Wright currency and Ethernet. Digital money is not a legal currency in any country or region through the transaction of data and the function of the transaction medium, the bookkeeping unit and the value storage Therefore, the encrypted digital currency is different from the electronic currency, and the electronic currency is the digital expression of the legal currency, which is used to carry out the electronic transaction of the legal currency.”
The fake press release also ended with this nonsensical endorsement: “The forthcoming VIRT, a trading counter token, is promising. Deutsche Börse, operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, even prepared a $ 60 million financing for Digital Asset Holdings. Elmer Funke Kupper, ASX’s chief executive, also expressed his deep concern and support.”
If whoever is behind Virt is doing this for comedic effect, they might soon wind up with a not-so-hilarious lawsuit on their hands.
Is this an obvious scam or could it be some sort of elaborate prank gone wrong? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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