A Walmart announcement that turned out to be a hoax has caused the price of the litecoincryptocurrency to shoot up by more than a third.
A news release on Monday stated that Walmart had partnered with litecoin to allow customers to make payments with cryptocurrencies, however the email used for the alert was fake.
“The momentum and excitement around the use of cryptocurrency are undeniable, and we are poised to make online shopping easy for our customers,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon purportedly said.
“Starting 1 October, all eCommerce stores will have implemented a ‘Pay with Litecoin Option’.”
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Several leading outlets reported the news before realising the error, including Reuters.
The price of litecoin immediately rose from around $170 to above $230 before the error was realised.
Industry experts have described it as a massive “pump and dump” scheme designed to artificially inflate the value of the cryptocurrency, before cashing in the profits and causing it to crash.
Litecoin is one of the earliest cryptocurrencies and used to be known as “the silver to bitcoin’s gold” as the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency.
It has since been overtaken by several other leading cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ether) and Cardano (ada), and now ranks as the 14th most valuable cryptocurrency on the CoinMarketCap crypto price index.
