China’s Memo About A Bitcoin Crackdown Was Created By A Hacker And Is Fake.

The latest Chinese rumours involving regulation and a crackdown turn out to be the works of a hacker. Here’s what happened.

Several media sources reported that China will block all websites related to cryptocurrency trading and ICOs – including foreign exchanges. But this turned out to be caused by a hacker.

A mailbox at the Hefei branch of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), was hacked, and a bogus press release was sent from the mailbox to several media organisations and newspapers.

The press release claimed that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the PBOC are about to jointly introduce new measures to ban “all aspects and services of Bitcoin trading in both mainland China and Hong Kong.”

The fake press release also said the PBOC and the HKMA will announce a new anti-money-laundering regulatory framework on February 14. It claimed the purpose was to extend the crackdown to “all virtual currency services and activities of both individuals and business including market makers, mining operators, trading platforms and wallets.”

On February 5th and 6th, many media organisations reported on this fake memo, including The South China Morning Post, Business Insider, Bitcoin.com and China’s official Xinhua news agency. This caused a lot of damage to Bitcoin as this fake news was spread.

According to spokespeople at the monetary authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing, no such regulatory briefing has been scheduled (source: The South China Morning Post).

The invitation to the regulatory briefing was sent by an email address that could easily be mistaken for authentic, due to the fact that it looked similar to the email addresses used by the actual central bank.

The owner of the email address was an official working in a branch of the Chinese Central Bank. He claims he had no idea about the message sent from his email, adding that he was hacked.

In conclusion, we can clearly determine that the FUD about China banning cryptocurrencies was fake news spread by a hacker. In fact, this hacker was purposely trying to drive the price of Bitcoin down, which he has successfully done.

*If you liked this article, take a look at stopthefud.wordpress.com