Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency continues to attract online fraudsters who are pretending to sell the coins that are not even close to being released. The project has attracted the attention and cunning efforts over the last few months, with at least a dozen fake sellers on social media, were trying to convince users to buy Libra.
The latest criminal outfit to pop up is a Twitter account that conducts a fake Initial Coin Offering (ICO) ) to scam people out of their own money. Apparently, the @CoinLibraToken handle is claiming to sell Libra coins to the public and here’s how the knockoff looks like:
Day1 of ICO Ends in less than 2 Hours
0.1 ETH = 500,000,000 0.5 ETH = 5,000,000,000 1 ETH = 25,000,000,000 2 ETH = 100,000,000,000 ✅Send Ethereum (Investments) to : 0xF79Bafc0739dB4f3e49A3F47a7B807b13C662784 ?Next : Exchange Processing Retweet Follow Comment Wallet#ico pic.twitter.com/RyJTiGBTob — Libra (@CoinLibraToken) January 27, 2020
According to checks made by Blockchain news website Cryptoslate, more than 40 percent of the fake Libra’s 12,000 followers are also fake. Further, the wallet address that potential victims were instructed to send their investments to shows only inbound transactions, most of which were tiny ETH amounts.
Moreover, the promotional materials on the Twitter account were full of typos and mistakes, making its credibility questionable, to say the least.
While Libra doesn't have a monetary value right now because it hasn't launched yet, the scammers claim that investing 0.1 ETH would yield 300 million in tokens, while sending a whole Ethereum block would make the sender entitled to 30 billion. Anyone who registered for that would then get hit up by a boiler room.
The first flush of libra scammers targeting the unwary has emerged in mid-2019 even as Facebook said it might never actually see its planned 2020 rollout.
The reasons for FB’s seemingly impossible task are regulatory hurdles and lobbyist blockades that may interfere with its plan to create the first widely adopted version of digital money.
Libra has already caused quite a stir among regulators and politicians across the world. Along with the difficulties with current regulations, major central banks expressed concerns about the consequences it would bring, while others asked for a moratorium on the development of the cryptocurrency until more is known.
Most of its major backers have also pulled out of the coalition of companies involved in a Facebook-led cryptocurrency initiative, Libra Association.
