Wall Street Journal: hundreds of ICO projects have signs of plagiarism and fraud

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) conducted research among more than 3,000 cryptocurrency projects and found out that hundreds of companies are copying parts of the Whitepapers from each other, promising inflated interest on investments and showing signs of fraud.

It is reported that analysts edition downloaded and studied 3 291 whitepaper - an information document that describes the company's goal, the composition of the team, the technical specifications of the project and so on.

"To identify duplicate language, the Journal compared sentences with at least 10 unique words to every other sentence in other white papers. Reporters then read and reviewed nearly 10,000 sentences appearing more than once among the 3,291 papers analyzed and removed technical and legal sounding language. Then, the Journal compared reported offering dates to determine which document first published any given sentence and excluded those projects from this database," reports WSJ.

According to the researchers, 16% of the studied Whitepapers - 513 documents - have signs of plagiarism, fakes of personality and unfulfilled promises of income. More than 2,000 Whitepapers use enticing phrases like "you will not lose anything", "guaranteed income", "percentage of income", "highest interest", "high income", "stock returns" and "risk-free".

The WSJ team also tried to find out the identities of the fake employees who were listed in White Books, using the search for images of people participating in cryptocurrency projects. In some documents there was no team data at all, so the researchers searched by name. However, the results of these searches are not reported.

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