CoinPoker Marketing Info Stolen for Planned Bogus THPCoin Offering
Amid the recent controversy surrounding new crypto-base online poker site CoinPoker, a secondary tale has emerged: CoinPoker’s stylish marketing and promotional material has been stolen and repurposed by person or persons unknown, for the probable planned use of a fraudulent ICO called THPCoin.
Information about the bogus THPCoin offering surfaced as I did research into CoinPoker on other matters. That research uncovered the fraudulent site, which appears to be directed toward China and Chinese nationals who are interested in the crypto-poker market.
The fraudulent THPCoin — it’s supposed to stand for “Texas Hold’em Poker Coin” — and its associated site exhibit large amounts of material swiped directly from CoinPoker’s public offering.
Here’s one of the site’s headline graphics, which is made up of several generic poker images commonly available on the web:
That’s not the heart of the theft, however. Here’s a sample image from the site’s TOC page, which simply inserts “THPCoin” into stolen text where CoinPoker’s “CHP” previously appeared. Note that the bogus THPCoin’s TOC didn’t even bother to change the legal address, which is actually that of CoinPoker’s corporate counsel in Cyprus.
Or, there’s the act of simply stealing all the information about CoinPoker’s staff and business partners and simply copying that over to a similar (but highly bogus) page at THPCoin:
Here’s one more example, showing another example of stolen graphics. This comes from CoinPoker’s visual representation of how coins were distributed via its CHP ICO, and note that “CHP” still appears in a couple of spots in the fake:
The bogus crypto coin does not appear to have been offered to date, at least on any major coin exchanges. Other steps in launching an ICO may have led to the would-be fraudster dropping the project, but the intent was clear. The domain hosting all the stolen content was anonymously registered on January 8th, 2018, through a Chinese registrar, Jiangsi Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd, and it may be being hosted at the present time at a server in California.
The existence of the THPCoin site and all the CoinPoker-related information was brought to the attention of CoinPoker’s Manager of Content and SEO, Sarah Hamid, amid e-mail exchanges on other CoinPoker topics.
Hamid confirmed the site was a fraud, and she offered this as a full response:
At first glance it appears to be a scam site, and we would recommend users to avoid engaging or purchasing their tokens. Since we discovered that parts of CoinPoker information was copied, and that our advisors and team members are falsely advertised as working on their project, we took the liberty of passing this information on to our Chinese partners to see if they are able to identify the scammers behind it, or if that project could be shut down and Chinese poker community warned.
As for the Chinese market in general, we expect and are working towards increased traffic from China. Our representatives have just visited China to plan multiple promos there, which will be announced in April.
This THPCoin would-be scam is thus added to a growing list of crypto-related online-gambling sites. Another such likely scam was exposed just a few days back, when TheMerkle.com published allegations that ZeroEdge and its planned “ZeroCoin” is an elaborate fraud, despite that project having raised millions in investment funds to date.
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