The “Bakkt” exchange, the brainchild of U.S. cryptocurrency exchange power couple John Schroeder and Kelly Loeffler, has been slow in arriving.
After widely publicizing the coming back platform months ago, the Intercontinental Exchange, the party behind Bakkt development, kept pushing the release date further and further into 2019.
Then the news kind of stopped, and we didn’t hear much from ICE after that.
This week, there’s some unusual and unprecedented news about the platform – being that apparently someone has leapt into the gap and created a fake scam Bakkt platform.
“A new Bitcoin (BTC) scam website representing digital assets platform Bakkt has appeared on the internet, with its domain, ‘bakktplatform.io’ registered on Jan. 31,” wrote Helen Partz at Cointelegraph earlier today. “The fake Bakkt website claims that the launch of the platform will take place on March 12, also offering investors a chance to participate in another funding round, accepting ‘investments’ in Bitcoin.”
According to Partz’ reporting, this fake website even mentions specific amounts of funding and a dedicated timeline for additional rounds of financing, the hiring of employees, and a fake Bakkt launch date of March 12.
However, she notes that the Bitcoin address involved has “accounted for zero transactions as of press time.”
Reporters covering this news are scandalized. Jibin George at AMBCrypto calls the report “another addition in the list of unusual news this year.”
However, George illustrates hoe the fake Bakkt failed to pull the wool over users’ eyes.
“Like the email, the page itself has a lot of red flags,” George writes. “The home page, which is now archived, is littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes. “Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company behind Bakkt, has already confirmed the fact that the platform is a fraud and that there has been no communication between them and the party behind bakktplatform.io.”
It’s unfortunate that in the wake of this news, the real Bakkt founders did not provide a comment to Cointelegraph (or some other pub)more robust comment, since some public explanations from the legitimate platform builders would go a long way toward addressing any confusion.
Traders and investors have been waiting on this bold new platform to arrive, as it might signal changes in cryptocurrency markets. Now they have a double disappointment – no news on the legitimate platform, and direct evidence of a fraudulent scam that will just muddy the waters even more.
We’ll keep trying to update readers on what’s happening with Bakkt – not only because of its market potential, but because it’s such a hot button topic in the crypto world, and because this new fraud launches its own aspect of scandal to the entire process. Watch this space.
