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Bitcoin

Kroger Gets Hit by Fake Crypto News (bloomberg.com) 24

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Kroger said a press release announcing plans to begin accepting Bitcoin Cash was fraudulent, marking the latest apparent scam tying a major retailer to cryptocurrency. From a report: The statement appeared early Friday on PRNewswire, a service used by many large companies to make official announcements. Kroger's investor-relations website automatically picked up the release, the grocer said. Media organizations including Bloomberg News published the information, and Bitcoin Cash briefly spiked about 5%. "This communication was fraudulent and is unfounded and should be disregarded," Kroger said. The episode recalled a similar scam less than two months ago involving Walmart. In that situation, a fake statement went out on a separate wire service, GlobeNewswire, saying the retail giant would begin accepting the cryptocurrency Litecoin. The fake news release set off a short-lived surge of more than 30% in Litecoin before Walmart said the information was false and the statement was taken down.
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Kroger Gets Hit by Fake Crypto News More

Kroger Gets Hit by Fake Crypto News

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  • insider trading? someone needs to do hard time for financial crimes

  • Buy and hype, since day one (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tekram ( 8023518 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @01:11PM (#61960419)

    https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-casino/
    What was striking about the deal he tried to draw me into: He offered to buy my book for bitcoin and help me sell a few more books for bitcoin, and in return I would leverage my site to hype bitcoin to my readers.

    Ladies and gentlemen, this is exactly how it worked universally, and even today the same principle is in effect, but now big players have jumped into it, and they quietly bought bitcoin, and then they used their global megaphones that the mainstream media amplified for all to see, and they hyped bitcoin, and it’s on the front of the mainstream media, and bitcoin has soared.

    Buy and hype. This is the principle on which bitcoin has operated from day one. Everyone getting into it would become a hype artist. And there would be no metric by which its price could be judged. These two factors were the true genius behind bitcoin.

  • Pump-n-dump (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Friday November 05, 2021 @01:13PM (#61960423) Journal

    This smelled of horseshit from the first headline. Someone should probably look to see who unloaded a shitload on the rise in order to take a bunch of speculators for a ride. This never seemed legit, because Kroger doesn't even support ApplePay / Google Pay yet - no way they skip that and go directly for crypto payment.

    Plus, who the hell would use crypto to pay for lettuce and milk?

    • > Plus, who the hell would use crypto to pay for lettuce and milk?

      People who aren't keeping their wealth in a hyperinflating currency?

      I bought some loaded french fries with Bitcoin Cash this summer to try it out and it was fast and trivial.

      • So was that a true bitcoin transaction where both parties had to wait for the ledger to be updated or did you use a broker that really just acts like a credit card company? Oh I am sorry, an 'exchange'.

        • You only need to wait for things like buying a car or exchanging money. Transactions show up on the network in seconds. At that point, the merchant is about as safe as accepting a credit card which can get a charge back. You only need to wait if you're at risk from serious repeated fraud. Selling fries can be done immediately with Bitcoin.

          Worst case scenario for a restaurant is they wait for a single confirmation which takes about ten minutes. There's never any reason to wait for a second confirmation becau

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Because Bitcoin is not hyperinflationary at all. It's volatile.

          I know many people living paycheck to paycheck can't wrap their heads around this, but volatility can be safely ignored if you don't spend every dollar you have whenever you receive it.

          By putting all my spare dollars into Bitcoin up front, when I buy something 2 years later, it's cheaper to buy with my 2-year-old Bitcoin than it is to buy with my dollars.

          Bitcoin is for people who know how to save money. Not for people who constantly find themsel

  • Why there is a distrust of the media. None of these outlets could be bothered to fire off and e-mail or pick up the phone for 30 seconds to verify any of this.
    • Well to be fair, they weren't reporting that it was news... they were just reporting that someone else was reporting that it was news...

  • Is there some way to filter out all cryptocurrency and nft articles on Slashdot? It's been ridiculous for a while and it just seems to be getting worse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nwaack ( 3482871 )
      Agreed. The bigwigs at /. must own a lot of crypto and are hoping if they keep shoving it down our throats we'll by some cuz of FOMO and they can continue the ponzi scheme.
    • They don't appear to be listed under Options->Exclusions, so no. But then the 'new' Slashdot owner may not even know there is an exclusion list of which to add these new subjects...

  • Kroger is a company too up-their-own-butts to allow worldwide-standard NFC payments in the flipping year 2021. They were never going to do anything with crypto.

  • This article is not about Bitcoin but about another scam with Bitcoin Cash, a fork which has attempted to muddy the waters and trade on the brand for years.

    • How is BCH any more of a scam than BTC?

      • Good question. The team behind it made lots of false promises and used the bitcoin.com domain name to attempt to get people to purchase it, thinking they were buying the genuine article. Here, with this article, the scam continues today. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin, and yet its material to FUD BTC.

        • That's biased as hell dude.

          BTC, BCH, and BSV all have their evangelists, all claiming the "true" heritage of Satoshi Nakamoto/Bitcoin.

          Whether or not the BCH crew made any "false promises" is immaterial. They were sort of a joke in that they spent a lot of time trying to spruce up an old, stodgey code base (Bitcoin "core"), but at least they were committed to improving the protocol somehow instead of leaving in its current state. Which is, from a technical point of view, sad.

          Fact is that the world has left

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