Transport for London (TfL) has been getting requests to stop allowing advertisements for cryptocurrency, a report says.
This comes after TfL had a three-week poster campaign for a crypto token called Floki Inu, named after a dog owned by Elon Musk, which was funded by an anonymous group.
The ads appeared on buses and in Underground stations in London throughout October.
The software used to make crypto has become widely available since bitcoin was invented. Now it has been used to make hundreds of new digital tokens, with many coming from online jokes and memes.
In the U.K. crypto is unregulated, and some cryptocurrency has been used for scams. According to Green party London Assembly member Siân Berry, the campaign “should have raised a red flag.” She said someone at TfL should’ve looked closer at the ads, along with two others that have aired in recent weeks.
“Where the advert says ‘this is completely unregulated, you may lose all your money’, they ought to have had second thoughts. I don’t think cryptocurrency ads should be on the network. They’re unethical.”
That said, there’s no indication that Floki Inu is run by scammers. But the report notes that digital tokens can be used in “pump and dump” scams where some investors garner intense attention toward a coin, and then get massive profits by dumping the assets when the price is higher. That happened recently with the SQUID token, based on the Netflix show “Squid Game.”
The website for Floki Inu doesn’t offer names of those involved, nor any contact addresses, and journalistic requests for information weren’t responded to.
PYMNTS reports that there are more businesses looking into using crypto for B2B purposes. Forty percent of companies surveyed in a recent PYMNTS study plan to use digital currencies for those sorts of purposes, with benefits including better settlement times and less costs for cross-border payments.
Read more: Banks Understand Crypto’s B2B Potential But Will Take ‘Baby Steps’ All the Way
According to Liquid Group CEO Jeremy Tan, there are still obstacles, though – including the volatility, lack of framework and lack of regulation.
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