The Wall Street Journal on May 17 released the results of its analysis of nearly 1,500 initial coin offerings (ICOs), showing that 18.6% of them were suspicious. The WSJ staff warned that among the 1,450 IPOs they found, 271 used “deceptive or outright fraudulent tactics.”
These tactics range from hiding or misrepresenting the location of the issuing company and management to plagiarizing white papers. Of the 271 suspicious businesses, some have already closed, and investors have lost about $273 million.
Authorities around the world continue to struggle with the growing number of ICOs. This year, the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to closely monitor "domestic" suspicious companies. Opinions on this method of fundraising are also divided both within and outside the community.
Cointelegraph today reported that the CEO of the UK platform CoinShares, Danny Masters, said that improvements in the ICO space should be an important part of the development of the Bitcoin market.
Despite this, earlier this month the CEO of the world's largest crypto exchange Binance Zhao Changpeng wrote a blog post praising ICOs, investments in which he called “a hundred times easier than traditional venture capital.”
“Scams are everywhere. I still get text messages claiming I won a huge prize and All I need to do to get it is make a small bank transfer. Does this mean we need to ban phones, SMS, and banks?”
Note. editors:The analysis of The Wall Street Journal experts is very optimistic, in our opinion. According to some sources, the number of fraudulent ICO is more than half of those conducted.
According to https://cointelegraph.com
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