Legal Action is Threatened by High-Frequency Trading Firm Virtu against Virtcoin

Is this an obvious scam or could it be some sort of elaborate prank gone wrong?

A warning has been issued to the public on Friday against Virtcoin by Virtu Financial (NASDAQ: VIRT), one of the largest high-frequency trading firms on Wall Street, explaining that it has no relationship, connection, or affiliation to the company and its officers and directors.

In addition, “Virtu has notified the appropriate authorities and intends to commence all necessary legal actions to defend itself from any attempt to infringe on Virtu’s copyrights, trademarks and intellectual property.”

This came into view after a fake press release was sent out by Virt on Wednesday using images of the Virtu team and attempting to link the two entities. “Douglas Cifu, Virtu Financial’s chief executive, told Wall Street recently that the company is going to issue the upcoming token VIRT for the trading desk,” claimed the misleading press release.

Judging by the website and whitepaper project, Virt is either run by a bunch of Chinese scammers that are oblivious to basic English and are depending on auto-translation software, or is an entity that is feigning illiteracy for some reason.

For example, the Virt whitepaper opens with this word coup: “Encrypted digital currency is a form of value data based on block chain underlying technology. At present, the most outstanding ones are bitcoin, Wright currency and Ethernet. Digital money is not a legal currency in any country or region through the transaction of data and the function of the transaction medium, the bookkeeping unit and the value storage. Therefore, the encrypted digital currency is different from the electronic currency, and the electronic currency is the digital expression of the legal currency, which is used to carry out the electronic transaction of the legal currency.”

Also, the fake press release concluded with this nonsensical affirmation: “The forthcoming VIRT, a trading counter token, is promising. Deutsche Borse, operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, even prepared a $60 million financing for Digital Asset Holdings. Elmer Funke Kupper, ASX’s chief executive, also expressed his deep concern and support.”

If whoever is behind Virt is doing this for comedic effect, they might soon end up with a not-so-hilarious lawsuit on their hands.