Last week, the High-Frequency Trading firm Virtu became the latest victim of cloning frauds. Its corporate image was used in a desperate bid to obtain investors. Virt’s logo even looks eerily similar to Virtu. You wonder if it is a bad ICO authoring joke or a pun on the state of the crypto ecosphere.
Crypto sphere Cloning Scams
Virtu has threatened legal action against Virt for infringing on its brand image. In its public notice issued on Friday, the HFT firm characteristically distanced itself from Virtcoin. Besides that, the communiqué stated, “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.”
On Wednesday, a Virt press release used images of the Virtu team implying the two are a single firm. What is even worse, Virt’s dishonest press release asserted, “Douglas Cifu, Virtu Financials chief executive, told Wall Street recently that the company is going to issue the upcoming token VIRT for the trading desk.”
Shock and Consternation
It seems likely that a group of Chinese fraudsters, who lack basic command of the English language, run Virt. An observant eye easily spots numerous syntactical and grammatical errors on Virt’s website and whitepaper. Apart from that, the content of both documents seems auto-generated using a spinning software.
An example of Virt’s auto-generated content is in the opening of the firm’s whitepaper,
“Encrypted digital currency is a form of value data based on blockchain 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 encrypted digital currency, on the basis of centralization, is based on the value currency of a series of underlying technologies, such as distributed accounts, cryptography, hash algorithm and so on.”
Virt’s duplicity is further evident in the conclusion of its press release “The forthcoming VIRT, a trading counter token, is promising. Deutsche Börse, an 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.”