Blockchain.com, one of the old-timers of the cryptocurrency market and the leader among the online wallets for bitcoin users, filed with the South District court of New York on allegedly fraudulent crypto-wallet trying to imitate design and domain of Blockchain.com
Blockchain.com vs. Blockchain.io
Blockchain.com's team of developers, one of the most popular crypto wallets in the market, discovered a site with a similar domain name, blockchain.io, which, according to developers of the true Blockchain wallet, is trying to attract attention of customers via illicit marketing technics.
"Blockchain works hard behind the scenes to protect crypto users from scams, frauds and false advertising <...> Today we filed a complaint in U.S. federal court against a company calling themselves blockchain.io," Blockchain.com said in a blog post.
The main confusing similarities are a similar design of the website with shades of blue, almost identical domain name (only the domain zone differs), a similar logo (a cube instead of a square) made up of similar geometric shapes. The team of a true cryptocurrency wallet found similarity even in their slogans - “your gateway to the internet of value” instead of Blockchain.com's “connecting the world to crypto.”
As stated in the complaint filed by two legal entities, Blockchain Luxembourg S.A. and Blockchain US Inc, Blockchain.io is managed by a non-existent bitcoin company, formerly known as Paymium. It operated Instawallet a few years ago, but in 2013 the crypto wallet fell victim to a hacker attack, resulted in customers' assets being stolen. According to the team of Blockchain.com, behind the Blockchain.io site-imitator is backed by the founder and CEO Paymium.
Blockchain.com name used for ICO
Blockchain.com suspects that the change of domain name and imitation of a successful market leader is aimed at attracting attention to the service and raise more funding during its ICO.
“They claim to raise money to offer some technologies that don’t actually exist. They also claim the ICO is registered with the SEC but there’s no registration statement in place for the offering. This means users won’t be able to trade the token publicly as Paymium led them to believe. The SEC just announced last week an enforcement action against an ICO project that made this same misrepresentation. Similarly, blockchain.io claim that their ICO is registered with the French regulator the ACPR, but we can find no evidence of this.”
It is worth noting that often false website created by fraudsters are aimed not at raising more funding during ICO, but for stealing logins, passwords and private keys of users of true cryptocurrency services. For example, in 2018, hackers cracked the DNS servers used by MyEtherWallet, and managed to steal private keys and coins of those users who visited the MEW website through their browser and who were stealthily redirected to a phishing page stealing user data.
