It has been brought to the attention of the GIFT team that a different crypto project known as “Gifto”, which was previously a “dead project” (not active since 2019) appears to have been taken over by persons who have recently been attempting to impersonate the GIFT project.
This is a problem for the GIFT project because we believe that the new owners of the “Gifto” Twitter account are deliberately attempting to mislead the public, in order to capitalize on GIFT’s recent establishment and success.
In this article, we will provide a short history of the events so far, and give details on the next steps — as well as giving details on how members of our community can help us.
What has happened so far?
In April 2021, when the co-founders of GIFT were establishing the project, they did their due diligence and found that there were two main other projects also using a name like “GIFT” — one of those projects was “Gifto”. After doing extensive research, we discovered that the project had been inactive since 2019.
Important note: GIFT and Gifto have completely different utilities — Gifto wanted to build an entire blockchain based around gift sending. At GIFT, our utility is the Gift sending platform, which is unique to this project and was designed by our in-house dev team. There are no other direct competitors who have designed a crypto gift sending platform at this point.
In April 2021 when we did our research, the Gifto Twitter page, website and other channels (including the Medium page) had all been last active in 2019. On the Gifto CoinMarketCap page, you can see that the whitepaper has been deleted, the Reddit has been deleted, the GitHub has not been active since 2019, and the website is now classified as “not secure.”
Therefore, the GIFT team decided to classify Gifto as a “dead/inactive” project that should not be a source of concern for the team.
Since Gifto became inactive, in May 2021 the “@Gifto_io” Twitter handle was hacked/taken over by someone who allegedly represents “ZEPcash”. They openly admitted to the hack as you can see in this screenshot:
On June 6th 2021, the @Gifto_io Twitter page deleted all of their previous tweets and the account is now posting content that is copied from the GIFT team’s Medium and other sources.
The person(s) running the @Gifto_io account posted this article entitled “What does Gifto do?”, which is a direct copy and paste of the same article first posted on the GIFT Medium page on April 27th. They even used the same image and branding from the original GIFT Coin article.
The person(s) running the Gifto account also retweeted this World Token video announcement. Gifto is a dead coin and has no partnership with World Token — it is likely that they were attempting to confuse new users into thinking that this is the page for GIFT Coin (who are actually partnered with World Token, as confirmed here.)
The fake Gifto Medium page posted a variety of articles that were stolen from the GIFT Coin Medium page, as well as copy-and-pasted from Investopedia. As of June 10th, the fake Gifto Medium Page has been suspended for breaching Medium’s rules.
In the Gifto Telegram group, no admins or team members have been active since 2019. As detailed in the screenshot below, some Telegram users have been attempting to mislead other Gifto community members into thinking that GIFT Coin (on Binance Smart Chain) is not a legitimate project, and that Gifto is a legitimate and active project. These allegations are untrue, and are deliberately misleading.
For clarification: $GTO was listed on Binance a number of years ago.
$GIFT was listed on PancakeSwap in May 2021.
It is also worth noting that the tweets currently seen on the Gifto Twitter page which suggest that there will be a “mainnet upgrade” on June 14th are very likely to be false.
We have attempted to contact legitimate members of the Gifto team multiple times but we have not been successful, because it appears that they have completely abandoned the project.
What’s more, the graphics on the Gifto Twitter page appear to be extremely random, and are not branded/consistent with previous Gifto graphics in any way.
This leads us to believe that the alleged Gifto “mainnet update” on June 14th is actually a deliberate scam campaign by the person(s) running the @Gifto_io Twitter account.
Why does any of this matter?
While Gifto has been abandoned by its team, the $GTO token is still freely trade-able on Binance and the other exchanges where the token is listed. This is typical — even when projects are abandoned by their teams, sometimes the coin will remain trade-able on exchanges.
However, the problem is that:
- New users who want to invest in Gift Coin $GIFT (on BSC) might be confused/misled into thinking that Gifto $GTO is the same project.
- New users might be investing in $GTO because they think that it’s an active project with a mainnet upgrade coming on June 14th — when in fact, the Gifto Twitter has been hacked and there is no upgrade coming for Gifto, which has been abandoned by its developers.
What are the next steps?
We’re hoping that by raising enough awareness about this, we can prevent future users from being confused between $GTO and $GIFT.
Community members can help to protect other users by:
- Reporting the hacked Gifto Twitter handle — https://twitter.com/GIFTO_io for “Pretending to be someone else.”
- Sharing this story on social media so that everyone is aware of the difference between GIFT Coin and Gifto.
If you have any questions or concerns about this, please feel free to join the GIFT Coin Telegram group to speak to our team directly: https://t.me/giftcointg
We would love to speak directly to a member of the Gifto team, or a Binance representative, so that we could take further action on this matter.
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