Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
The Chinese government is planning to further restrict trading in cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) in the country by blocking access to overseas cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms, reports South China Morning Post, quoting an article in Financial News, a publication affiliated to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC).
According to the article, the current restrictions banning the operation of local exchanges and trading in ICOs that was imposed last September, failed to put an end to cryptocurrency trading in China and users have moved to foreign platforms.
“ICOs and virtual currency trading did not completely withdraw from China following the official ban … after the closure of the domestic virtual currency exchanges, many people turned to overseas platforms to continue participating in virtual currency transactions”, the publication noted, adding that the regulatory and other risks such as illegal issuance and Ponzi schemes, remain.
According to the Xinhua wire service, the PBOC said on Monday it will further tighten the restrictions on domestic investors’ participation in overseas transactions of ICOs and trading.
Meanwhile, South China Morning Post also reports that searches on “bitcoin”, “cryptocurrency” and “ICO” in China’s largest search engine Baidu and the largest microblogging platform Weibo do not return any results – neither as sponsored posts, nor as paid ads. Considering that Google, Facebook and Twitter are among the hundreds of sites that cannot be accessed from mainland China, in essence this means that the ultimate clampdown on cryptocurrencies in China has begun.
Weibo told South China Morning post that it currently does not allow bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related advertising, while Baidu did not immediately respond to questions whether it has banned bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related advertising.
We remind you that last week Facebook said it is banning the ads of high risk financial products that include cryptocurrencies, ICOs and binary options. The restriction also applies to Instagram and Facebook’s partnering sites.
