Welp, AsiaOne's now big enough to be used as part of a cryptocurrency scam
PUBLISHED ONNovember 07, 2019 8:10 AMByIlyas Sholihyn
Well, well, well. It seems that AsiaOne has garnered enough internet clout to be brandished as a platform to scam folks into purchasing cryptocurrency that hasn’t even been launched yet.
The very legit-sounding Calibra-Pay went ahead and cloned the design of an AsiaOne article — an article that shills the benefits of Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency, Libra. The byline-less article goes on to state that Libra can only be bought from Calibra-Pay, which claims to be “Facebook’s approved partnering firm”.
A nominal check around the AsiaOne office revealed that none of us actually cared that much about Libra — or even cryptocurrency for that matter — to sneakily publish a piece lauding the benefits of digital money.
Not to mention the fact that Libra hasn’t even gone live. Despite Facebook struggling to get governments on board their currency before releasing it sometime next year, the article states outright that the coin officially launched on Wednesday (Nov 6) and is available for purchase right now at just $0.0011 cents. Shamazing! "Mark Zuckerberg himself told us about it!"
Let us critique this fake page, shall we?
No, no, this headline won’t do at all. First off, we don’t Capitalise Each Word. Plus, someone copy-pasted the headline twice, making for a very ugly, lengthy block of text at the top. Our Head of Content would have a fit before letting this go up on the site.
The header image is all warped, another no-no in our books. Where’s the image attribution? Come on, people, this is basic stuff.
Oh man, we can only wish that we had a direct line of contact to the billionaire head of Tesla. A cursory search on Google will show that a) he didn’t even say anything close to that and b) he “literally own(s) zero cryptocurrency”.
If this was true and we did get that much money in our digital wallets, do you even think any of us would want to reveal to everyone how we did it? It’ll devalue our currency!
Oh yeah, sure, our readers and active commenters are mainly made up of Caucasians. Also, we don’t have comments sections on our articles.
Really though? You haven't even read about our recent adventure building retro arcade machines by hand.
All jokes aside, please do not fall for this scam, which may or may not have popped up in your Facebook newsfeed as a sponsored post. We’ve already taken the appropriate action to get it taken down from social media.
Though it’s pretty obvious to some of us that it’s a fake page (I mean, the non-AsiaOne URL should be a dead giveaway), things may not be so clear cut to those who aren’t as internet-savvy.
Once again, please do not register an account and wire money over to this shady enterprise. If you happen to follow through with the instructions, it’ll lead you to a page which will direct you to deposit US$250 (S$339.87) to an account, and it’s highly likely that you won’t see it returned in any shape or form.
It’s unfortunate that the AsiaOne brand is being used as part of a scam, so if you see anyone — especially the older folks — sharing the “article” around, kindly point them to this page instead.
ilyas@asiaone.com