The crypto wallet maintained by official Blockchain team has filed a complaint in US federal court for copyright infringement and copycat website.
As reported on the blockchain blog post, alleged blockchain.io is a fraudulent and copycat website which is deliberately trying to rebrand the actual company assets. What’s more, that this act is misleading the customers and trick them into thinking that they are the real “Blockchain” team.
Essentially branding details of both sites resemble very closely which includes:
- Similar domain name to the website (blockchain.io)
- Similar colors to the website (shades of dark blue)
- Similar logo (a cube instead of a square) made up of similar geometric shapes (circles instead of rounded boxes).
- Repurposed tagline “connecting the world to crypto” through a thesaurus to come up with “your gateway to the internet of value.”
Furthermore, blockchain team claims that the blockchain.io is rebranded by the now-defunct company ‘Paymium’ also known as “Instawallet”, which in 2013 lost its users funds in a widely-publicized hack.
Also, the findings from the team suggest that the very purpose behind this act is their launch of new ‘ICO’ and perhaps this seems to be major concern point as to how they are representing their offer.
Among other allegations, blog stresses on fake ICO registration by alleged platform and it further elaborates that,
[ctt template=”7″ link=”1x5fU” via=”yes” ]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.[/ctt]
All this forced the official blockchain team to proceed with legal action and hence save the customers from unwanted misery.
Will the anonymity the in blockchain ecosystem be a major hurdle for it to flourish or the community will figure out how to tackle this issue? Share your thoughts in the comment section
