Walmart Says Crypto Announcement About Litecoin Integration Is Fake

A few days ago, headlines in the cryptocurrency news showed that Walmart is supposedly working with Litecoin and the infrastructure of the coin to support its payments. However, officials have risen up following these headlines and said that any association like this is fake. Basically, Walmart says crypto announcement about any LTC integration is fake.

The spokesman for the company, Randy Hargrove, confirmed that the press release is not authentic and said that the retailer has been in touch with the company publishing the news piece to investigate how the false information got posted online.

Further clarification showed that GlobeNewswire is owned by the telecom company Intrado, which issued a “notice to disregard” the original release at 11:18 a.m ET. However, the fake news went viral in a number of media organizations, which published headlines on the announcement. The Walmart shares also had some little movement, but Litecoin was down by 2.2% on that particular day.

According to GlobeNewswire, a fraudulent user account was used when the release was issued. Walmart says crypto announcements like these never happened – a spokesperson from the company noted the following:

“This has never happened before and we have already put in place enhanced authentication steps to prevent this isolated incident from occurring in the future. We will work with the appropriate authorities to request – and facilitate – a full investigation, including into any criminal activity associated with this matter.”

What was also interesting in the Litecoin news was the fact that LTC also tweeted the press release from the official account at 9:50 a.m. ET, while other reports on the fake news piece by big media outlets were instantly published five minutes after that. A statement from Monday afternoon showed a social media team member from the Litecoin Foundation saying that they “were a little too eager and shared the story from the Litecoin Twitter account. This was quickly deleted and we have taken steps to correct future issues.”

For those of you who saw the news release showing that the biggest retailer in the U.S. would accept cryptocurrency for payments from shoppers using LTC, you should now know that this information is fake and removed from the source.