In the quest to preempt investors, fraudsters follow trends in the cryptosphere and launch shadowy projects to steal the funds of investors who plan to enter markets early and benefit from them. The latest craze about metaverses and non-fungible tokens is an attractive space being exploited by malicious players. The technique used by these fraudsters is that they follow the news and preempt the launch by big players such as Facebook, Microsoft and more recently Walmart. All these companies have one common objective relative to the crypto industry: they’re all planning to launch metaverse projects and fraudsters are already launching fake versions of their metaverse projects with the intention to steal the funds of investors interested in investing in the projects of these big players.
Patency for Walmart NFT And Metaverse
In December, Walmart filed several trademarks indicative of its plans to start selling virtual goods. The company has also announced its plans to launch a virtual currency and its own NFT as the filings show. In a statement released by the company, it said that it is exploring technologies that can influence the experience of shoppers, even though it did not specify the patents that it filed with the US Patent And Trademark Office on December 30.
Posing As Walmart ICO
However, a recent project, WMT Metaverse claims to originate from Walmart, despite the fact that the company is yet to make any announcements pertaining to a metaverse launch.
The website claims that users and investors can:
“Enter the WMT Metaverse market, participate in land auctions and discover the WMT Metaverse ecosystem.”
It also claims that users can create 3D content that they can upload and sell on the metaverse.
A background check shows that the domain wmtmetaverse.com was registered by Namecheap on January 20, 2022. It also makes reference to the authentic Walmart website in a bid to claim legitimacy.
Meanwhile, the entity behind the scam is promoting it using a Facebook ad. They claim that the corporate office of the Walmart metaverse project is located at 645 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10022 which is obviously a false claim.
Some crypto buzzwords seen on the website are AR, VR, DeFi, NFT, Web3.0,OTT service (LOL) and ICO. These are propably terms used to impress new investors to steal their money. The project is also using fake Facebook accounts to shill their fake WMT token which they claim is valued $1.44 with 10 million available in its pre-sale that would end in 6 days.
