Get rich quick: ICO ghost writers offer initial coin offering ‘white papers’ for US$475
8,000-10,000 word business plans in Chinese in less than a week – who can resist?
Taobao, one of the world’s biggest e-commerce websites run and owned by China’s Alibaba Group, is arguably most famous for selling anything to anyone.
But a number of latest offerings are raising a few eyebrows for the wrong reasons, not least because they claim to be helping to sell one of the most controversial items on the market today: cryptocurrencies.
No less than 12 vendors on the site are offering buyers tailor-made, ghostwritten “white papers”, or business plans, on how to launch their very own initial coin offerings (ICO), or fundraisings using virtual currencies.
Two of them, who say they are based in Beijing and Shenzhen, told the South China Morning Post they can write 8,000-10,000 word plans in Chinese in less than a week, for the bargain price of 3,000 yuan (US$475). An English version will set you back another 3,500 yuan.
“In a way, they all just copy the technical parts from each other,” said Leonhard Weese, president of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong.
“Most ICOs don’t go into the detail they should. They just like using buzzwords.”