Foin Token Scheme Locks Up Investors’ Money and Pumps Price

On Dec. 15, news broke that cryptocurrency payments firm and wallet provider FoPay had acquired Estonia-based digital currency trading platform AliExchange for 1 million of its native Foin (FOIN) tokens. If one were to go by Foin’s apparent value at the time, that would make the deal worth roughly $2.1 billion. Indeed, FoPay claimed as much in the press release that it issued. But Cointelegraph has found a trail of suspicious movements in Foin’s price history, as well as a web of suspect business relationships associated with the coin’s development.

Several crypto news sites covered the claim of a $2.1 billion acquisition uncritically. (Cointelegraph did too, though we removed our article within 15 minutes, as soon as we saw that the article had not gone through our normal fact-checking process.)

The payment was ostensibly made by the Swiss-based Foin Foundation — the coin’s development entity — which has 20 million FOIN in its capital reserve, or over 20% of the…