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A news bulletin released Monday morning claiming that Walmart will begin accepting payments in Litecoin, a digital currency, raised its price 30 percent before the retail giant said the announcement was fake.
The version, apparently from Walmart itself, was posted on Globe Newswire, a communications service whose parent company Intrado is owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The release landed when trading began on the US stock market and was quickly picked up by several major news outlets, including: Reuters and Bloomberg. NS Litecoin price and other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have spread to exchanges like Coinbase.
Walmart soon released a statement stating that the Litecoin announcement was not true and did not allow it to be published.
“We’re digging deeper to understand what’s going on,” said Walmart spokesperson Randy Hargrove.
It was unclear who was behind the fake publication, which featured the hallmarks of a corporate publication to appear genuine but listed a contact email address on the unauthorized website walmart-corp.com, and how it bypassed Globe Newswire’s systems. . But this was not the first scam of its kind. In 2010, another news service published a story. fake broadcast He said the grain company General Mills was the subject of a federal investigation.
in 2009, federal securities regulators accused a broker who spreads fake bulletins to manipulate the shares of several publicly traded companies. In this case, the Securities and Exchange Commission acted quickly and filed enforcement proceedings just three weeks after the plan began.
Securities lawyers said regulators would likely open an investigation because the fraud involved a publicly traded company, and it didn’t matter whether the biggest spike in price was in a largely unregulated digital currency.
“This is a misrepresentation involving a public issuer,” said Andrew Calamari, attorney for Finn Dixon & Herling and former director of the SEC’s securities and New York office.
Federal prosecutors also have broad authority to investigate such market deceptions under electronic fraud law.
Representatives from the SEC and Globe Newswire were not available for immediate comment.
Mr. Hargrove said Walmart learned of this broadcast only after it began receiving calls from reporters seeking to verify accounts from some news outlets that published broadcast-based information. that the press contact named in the announcements and bulletin does not work in Walmart’s media division.
The news was also briefly published on the @Litecoin Twitter account. The Litecoin Foundation, which supports the development of the currency, later announced that it did not enter into a partnership with Walmart.
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