A Twitter account advertising a fake initial coin offering (ICO) for Libra – the Facebook backed stable coin that has yet to be launched latter this year – has apparently scammed hundreds of people.
The Twitter account named Libra, designated as @CoinLibraToken, has been operational since March 2018 and was requesting payments in Ethereum (ETH) from its followers.
Libra still does not have monetary value, because it has not been launched yet. The scammers however claimed that investing just 0.1 ETH would yield 300 million in Libra tokens (LIBT), while sending a whole Ethereum block would award the sender as much as 30 billion tokens.
And those that send 2 ETH were promised to get 100 billion LIBT, because of the generous bonus system.
The scammers were also using a call center to convince their victims to make more deposits.
The Libra launch is clouded by regulatory hurdles. Recently Vodafone was the latest of a series of companies, which decided to withdraw from the project amid growing regulatory pressure from major central banks and many governments.
Back in October Libra Association was also abandoned by MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay after the European Central Bank and the Bank of England warned that crypto currencies such as Libra pose a risk to the global financial system.
