Yesterday, a very special development took place in the crypto markets. For a while it seemed as if the prices of almost all cryptocurrencies were on the rise. Mostly Litecoin (LTC) rose explosively. This was the result of the news that litecoin would be accepted as a payment method at the American retail chain Walmart.
It was soon discovered that this fake news used to be. It was a sophisticated disinformation campaign with the aim of ‘pumping’ the price of litecoin. Even the biggest mainstream media platforms fell for it. Reuters and CNBC, among others, shared the message without doubting its authenticity.
Litecoin Foundation
The Litecoin Foundation, the organization behind litecoin, also fell for fake news. The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, showed in a interview with Bloomberg know how it could happen that so many people could be fooled in this way.
Lee states that he was initially ecstatic about the news. He couldn’t believe his luck, until he soon found out that it was fake.
The first news platform to spread the message was GlobeNewsWire. This platform has now announced that an investigation into the incident will be launched to identify the perpetrators. In addition, GlobeNewsWire indicates that from now on they will implement a better authentication process to prevent a similar incident.
According to Charlie Lee, the Litecoin Foundation can do little to help with this investigation. Although they were the subject of the disinformation, they are in no way involved in setting up this disinformation campaign, Lee said.
He admits that they were too quick to take the news for granted. He is very sorry that they had spread the fake news.
“We try really hard not to tweet ‘fake news’, but this time we really screwed up.”