The Beijing offices of cryptocurrency project Tron became the talk of the crypto sphere recently as videos showing people gathering outside the premises started circulating on the internet. The videos also show Chinese police officials in the office.
Where did the videos come from?
The source of the videos is unclear, but they were found all across the crypto Twitter on Monday. One of the crypto community members Hayden Otto noted in his tweets that there are several angry people gathered around the offices. They were also saying that “Tron is a scam.”
In one of the videos, numerous people can be seen standing around the entrance to the Tron office with the company’s logo visible clearly in the background. You can also see policemen trying to protect the office. In another video, one can see a woman inside the premises, shouting at someone else.
What does Tron have to say?
Several members of the crypto community used the videos to conclude that Tron is actually a scam. The official Tron Twitter handle avoided commenting on the videos for a couple of hours but eventually released a statement suggesting that the office shown in the video belongs to Tron. However, it noted that the people protesting there were actually victims of a copy-cat firm.
The firm noted that the employees at Raybo, its Chinese partner, communicated with the protesters at the office to find that at least some of them were defrauded by the Wave Field Super Community Scheme. The fraudulent scheme played on the similarity of its name (the Chinese language version of Tron’s name is “Wave Field”) to conduct fraudulent business. Tron further noted that the victims were promised high rates of return on their investments and the names of Tron, BitTorrent, and uTorrent were used to entice investors.
Tron Founder Justin Sun then tweeted, “@Tronfoundation and @BitTorrent are fine. Everything is fine. We are preparing for #BitTorrentSpeed launch today. Stop spreading fake news and pictures.”
Several news outlets had reported that the Wave Field Super Community scam made investors lose at least $30 million in cash before the perpetrators of the scheme fled. Interestingly, this is not the first time that Tron and its founder Sun have been called a fraud. The victims of the scam were also blaming Sun for not distancing himself or the company from the scheme even as the fraudsters claimed that they were among the 27 Super Representatives (or node operators) on the Tron network.