Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), the public institution which supervises the professionals and products of the Luxembourg financial sector, has published a warning against Ritzcoin Technologies. In it the regulator informs the public that the company is falsely claiming it has a CSSF authorization as “Cryptocurrency Institution”.
“The CSSF informs the public that an entity named Ritzcoin Technologies Inc. is unknown to it and that it has not been granted any authorisation to provide financial services in or from Luxembourg,” the regulator said. A post in the news section of Ritzcoin’s site, leading to a site in Chinese, however, claims it has obtained regulation from the CSSF, which provides access to the 28 EU member states and allows it to operate legally encrypted digital currency-related business within Europe.
According to its website, Ritzcoin Technologies was established in 2007 in the US by one Dr. Brett Sperry as a business analytics software vendor. In 2015 the company launched the Ritzcoin – a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Ritzcoin is an open source and fully decentralized cryptocurrency that purportedly is “more secured and more energy efficient than Bitcoin.”
According to various media reports and press releases, the company is involved in real estate projects and recently launched a luxury real estate investment in California, using cryptocurrency. A series of press releases on various PR announcement sites inform that Ritzcoin Technologies is a platinum sponsor of Global Blockchain Summit 2016 in Beijing and that Brett Sperry is going on a book tour in Asia. Oddly enough, all those news and messages have been posted on June 22, 2016.
At the same time, an SMN check revealed that Ritzcoin is not mentioned in neither of the major cryptocurrency news portals like CoinDesk, not is listed in the Coinmarketcap.com website, which tracks the value of 657 cryptocurrencies across 2045 markets.
It is not clear whether Ritzcoin is yet another cryptocurrency scam like the multi-level marketing scam OneCoin, of which Belgium’s FSMA warned last week, but, considering the false claims Ritzcoin is making about its regulations, it is worth being cautious.
