Ripple has confirmed that the rumors of its settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are fake, according to Fox Business's Charles Gasparino.
Earlier today, a now-deleted press release posted on news platform Accesswire stated that the SEC had dropped its charges against the company. The too-good-to-be-true hoax was syndicated by Yahoo! Finance and then made the rounds on social media.
The San Francisco-based company described the press release as "totally false":
We are working to get it taken down, but totally false and not sent by us.
Ripple's general counsel, Stuart Alderoty, has also taken to Twitter to confirm that the settlement news is fake.
This is fake.
— Stuart Alderoty (@s_alderoty) October 1, 2021
Another bogus press release about the settlement, which was posted by competing website iCrowdNewswire, seemed to come from Ripple's law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton. However, the email address of the firm that was attached to the release was fake.
In a recent interview, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said that his company would only be willing to settle with the agency if there was "absolute clarity" about the XRP cryptocurrency.
Fool me twice, shame on me
It's likely that a member of the XRP community tried to pull off a quick pump-and-dump by spreading fake news about the settlement. That said, the crypto community now appears to be immune to fake press releases (especially, to extremely amateurishly written ones).
As reported by U.Today, a bogus announcement about Walmart partnering with Litecoin made the price of the altcoin jump roughly 30% on Sept. 13 after the news was picked up by several mainstream media outlets and even the official Litecoin account on Twitter. One of the oldest cryptocurrencies quickly shed its gains after both parties rushed to deny the tie-up.
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