Scammers boosted the price of Bitcoin SV (BSV) Wednesday by publishing a fake news alert purporting to show that BSV’s creator is also bitcoin’s.

Masquerading as the Chinese news site Coinbull, the bogus alert claimed that Craig Wright had transferred bitcoin (BTC) from the so-called Satoshi wallets to prove his identity.

The result? A $60 boost in the bitcoin SV price in less than 10 hours.



Image via CoinMarketCap

Wright, who led the fork that created BSV in November 2018, has maintained for years that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous architect of bitcoin, but his claims continue to be met with widespread skepticism.

If he really were Satoshi, many critics have said, then Wright should control the private keys to the wallets that mined the first bitcoin – and thus needs only to move some of those coins to settle the matter.

Hence, the “alert” read:

CSW transferred 50k BTC from the biggest BTC wallet to Binance, which confirmed he is the real Satoshi. As such CZ will re-list BSV and make an official apology on Twitter.

These scams are common – and lucrative.

“The trick is easy and constantly used by many scams – all Chinese crypto media circulate the breaking news via picture as above in WeChat instead of a news link. So anybody can just use the same theme template and photoshop one,” said Dovey Wan, founding partner at Primitive Ventures.

Coinbull responded on WeChat with its own announcement, writing:

Coinbull announcement: regarding recent malicious photoshopped image to impersonate Coinbull to spread rumors. Recently, we have received feedback from users that certain people had maliciously sent out photoshopped Coinbull news alert to spread rumors about Binance and CSW which had bad consequences. We remind our users again not to trust any rumors and not to spread any rumors. Thank you for your support.”

BSV hit a $193.07 seven-day high on the rumor and is leveling out at about $180 as of this writing.

I don’t know how much this contribute to the pump, but this fake news snapshot went viral in many Chinese retail groups around the same time and folks (thought it was real) got super excited abt it 🙄🙄🙄 CHINESE RETAIL IS THE BEST HERD EVER — Dovey 以德服人 Wan 🪐🦖 (@DoveyWan) May 29, 2019

Image via Shutterstock