Facebook bans cryptocurrency ads because they’re mostly scams

After promising to fix its news feed by implementing sweeping changes, Facebook is taking another big step towards cleaning up its act: it’s banning ads promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) because they’re they’re usually BS .

To be clear, Facebook says that these financial products and services are “ frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, ” and has a few choice examples to explain what sort of ads will disappear from its feed, which you can see below:

Credit: Facebook

The move follows Facebook’s announcements about its decisions to cut back on posts from publishers and Pages you’ve subscribed to, in order to make room for more content shared by people in your social network ; the company also said it’s starting to surface more local news to ‘help build community.’

It’s good to see Facebook attempting to reduce the amount of damage crypto scams can do: people around the world have lost millions of dollars to shady businesses that raise money from backers and disappear without a trace, with few options to seek recourse. Many of the ads for these companies are designed to lure investors with the promise of high returns, without adequately warning them of the risks involved.

It’s not often I say this, but maybe Google and other ad-based businesses should take a leaf out of the social network’s book in this case.

Savedroid ICO’s exit scam was actually a very dumb PR stunt

Yesterday, numerous news outlets reported that popular cryptocurrency startup Savedroid – which purportedly raised $50 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) – had pulled an exit scam.

But in an interesting turn of events, it appears that the suspected exit scam was nothing more than a poorly thought-out PR stunt.

The whole situation unfolded after the Savedroid website suddenly went down, displaying just one cryptic meme:

As you could expect, many users went on to suspect that the website was hacked.

This is when Savedroid founder and CEO Yassin Hankir thought it would be a good idea to punk his Twitter following by convincing investors that the startup is pulling an exit scam. “Thanks guys,” he wrote. “Over and out,” he continued.

He also uploaded an image of himself enjoying a beer on the beach.

It didn’t take long until this silly stunt picked up. Indeed, given the recent string of exit scams in the cryptocurrency space ( Prodeum , Confido , Loopx ) , nobody found it bizarre that yet another ICO has dashed off with its investors’ money.

But now that this so-called “PR stunt” has gone viral, it seems Savedroid no longer thinks it is funny to pretend it is exit scamming.

Hankir revealed that all of this was just a ‘drastic campaign’ played to highlight how easy it, in fact, is for ICOs to run away with their investors’ money.

The Savedroid website has been restored as well.

As a result of this ghoulish PR exercise, Savedroid has in fact managed to bring the limelight back to the vital issue — ICOs need to be better regulated, and investors need to be smarter and more cautious about investing in them.

Still though, staging a bogus exit scam might not be the smartest way to get this message across.

Privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Verge (XVG) got its Twitter hacked

In an ironic turn of events, privacy-focused cryptocurrency Verge (XVG) got its Twitter account hacked yesterday. According to Verge team members on Telegram, no funds were at risk at any point in time and the breach was exclusively limited to its social media profiles.

Once in control of the account, the hackers proceeded to ask Verge followers to donate XVG to a fraudulent wallet for a chance to receive double the amount in return – a new scam tactic which has been running rampant in the blockchain space over the past couple of months.

The good thing is that the startup has since managed to reclaim control of its Twitter account. It has also deleted the tweets the attackers posted from its account. Those curios to peruse the deceitful tweets can see an archived version of them here and here .

Alternatively, you can see screenshots of the tweets below:

At the time of writing, the hackers have received “donations” for a total of 195 XVG (or about $7), according to a quick lookup on the Verge blockchain explorer.

Here’s a screenshot:

As far as the actual breach goes, Verge claims the attackers leveraged leaked Yahoo databases to gain access to the personal accounts of lead developer Justin Vendetta (more commonly known under the pseudonym Sunerok).

The hackers then managed to trick AT&T customer support reps into transferring the phone number associated with Vendetta’s personal accounts to a new SIM card. This made it possible to bypass Twitter’s two-factor authentication mechanism.

The attackers claimed that – in addition to breaching Verge’s Twitter account – they were also able to steal a billion XVG coins. Verge communication reps have since denied these claims, telling TNW that “t here was no money stolen.”

Verge has managed to bounce back from this minor hiccup without taking any significant hits to its value. The currency presently stands at $0.034 – a six-percent dip over the past 24 hours – according to Coin Market Cap .

Back in December last year, Verge made waves after controversial security pioneer John McAfee shilled the currency in one of his reckless ‘Coin of the Day’ series, where he recommended “solid” altcoins to cryptocurrency normies.

As with anything else he’s done in the blockchain space though, McAfee’s coin recommendations were often poorly researched – and sometimes straight-up misleading .

In any case, it seems the hackers went through a lot of trouble for 7 bucks.