On July 20 reports circulated that a partnership between electronics giant Samsung and Lithuanian crypto payment and blockchain startup CopPay was in the works. The deal was set to make it possible for Samsung customers in three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — to pay for in-store purchases with cryptocurrencies. In surprising news, it appears as though the collaboration could have been fabricated by CopPay.

Samsung Denies Partnership With CopPay

Despite the fact that several major news publications reported on about the supposed deal a Samsung spokesperson has denied the partnership, saying: “Our official response is that the rumor is not true,” according to Hard Fork.

The supposed partnership was first announced on CopPay’s Medium blog, which has since been deleted. Though an archived version is still accessible. CopPay, which is a relatively small crypto platform, claimed it had set up merchant gateways in 31 Samsung stores across the Baltic region. The announcement spoke of support for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Dash, Nem, and Steem.

The company went so far as to claim that Samsung had rallied under their slogan “Turn On Future,” and chose to “embrace” cryptocurrencies by using CopPay’s point-of-sale devices. As of now it’s not clear what led to the announcement and its subsequent removal from CopPay’s blog.

At first, Hard Fork reached out to CopPay for comment but were only told that the startup was in talks with Samsung concerning the matter. At the same time, Samsung told Hard Fork that the whole situation was simply an unsubstantiated rumor.

In an even more surprising turn of events, late this afternoon CopPay CEO Ina Samovich contacted Hard Fork and refuted Samsung’s statement, claiming that their partnership was in fact real. Samovich blamed the botched announcement on a communication mishap with an unnamed “reseller,” saying:

“The official reseller has singed agreement with our company and several transactions occurred during last two weeks. So we can prove that the crypto payment method was used and was powered by CopPay. We were not aware that reseller did not inform HQ about our cooperation.”

Fake Partnerships

Despite the currently conflicting stories, and that fact that full details are not fully available yet, there have been other instances of companies claiming collaboration with others in the crypto space in attempts to boost visibility.

In March, startup carVertical announced a deal with German carmaker BMW. It was later revealed that it wasn’t a “partnership” per se, but that carVertical were simply using third party data retrieved from BMW’s CarData interface to test its shared car-data blockchain platform, so no deal was in fact required.

Theres others, too. Last November, IOTA revealed that tech giant Microsoft was a partner in its data marketplace platform. In the immediate aftermath, IOTA’s market cap grew from $2.95 billion to over $13 billion. Unfortunately, just a few weeks later, Microsoft clarified that it had no official partnership with IOTA.

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