Around a sixth of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) show “signs of plagiarism, identity theft and promises of improbable returns”, according to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) study.
The Journal surveyed around 3,300 ICOs and concluded that about 16 percent of them (513 ICOs) presented those signs. We are talking about ICOs that have announced their campaigns in three reference websites: ICOBench.com, Tokendata.io and ICORating.com.
The plagiarism was perceived on the projects White Papers — a document that details the project’s mission, technical specifics and team.
The WSJ downloaded thousands of White Papers and looked for duplicated sentences between them, unrealistic “can’t miss” promises (such as “nothing to lose”, “guaranteed profit” or “no risk”) and misrepresented or fake team members.
The list of the 513 ICOs can be found here. Names like Biafracoin, BitDraw or Centra Tech Inc were red flagged in three categories.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest crypto and blockchain news.