Someone Is Impersonating Bitcoin Futures Platfom Bakkt to Raise Money

On Wednesday night, the CoinDesk news team received an email (subject line: “Bakkt News!”) claiming that the platform was set to launch on March 12. The email, sent from a gmail address and written in broken English, further stated that Bakkt would be seeking to raise $50 million in a second financing round and directed readers to a website, bakktplatform.io.

There, prospective investors are invited to register by entering their name and email address. After going through this process, visitors are presented with a bitcoin address to send their money and asked to provide their own address to receive their “profits” from the investment.

As of Thursday morning, no funds had been sent to the wallet.

The site (registered just a week ago through WhoisGuard, a domain owner-obscuring service in Panama, according to a WHOIS lookup) is a fake.

A spokesperson for Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Bakkt’s parent company, told CoinDesk: “that is not a Bakkt website and we wouldn’t have communicated in that way.”

Further, the email’s claims about Bakkt are dubious at best.