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A crypto app’s ad campaign telling people that “it’s time to buy” Bitcoin (BTC) has been ordered taken down or amended by the U.K.’s advertising watchdog. The regulator ruled that the ad was irresponsible and misleading considering its target audience.
Crypto app Luno ran a high-profile BTC ad campaign that was featured heavily across the city’s rapid transit system called the London Underground as well as the bus network since December last year, The Guardian reported. “If you’re seeing bitcoin on the Underground, it’s time to buy,” Luno’s ad reads.
While the ad appeared catchy, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) received multiple complaints regarding the advertisement. “Three complainants, who believed the ad failed to illustrate the risk of the investment, challenged whether it was misleading,” the regulator wrote on its site. “One complainant challenged whether the ad took advantage of consumers’ inexperience or credulity.”
After investigations, ASA sided with the complainants on both points. “We, therefore, concluded that the ad was misleading,” the regulator ruled, citing that it breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 on misleading advertising and 14.4 on financial products.
ASA explained that the ad’s locations across the London Underground and London Buses networks, makes it “likely to have been seen by consumers who did not have extensive financial knowledge and experience of Bitcoin, and would expect that the exchange of Bitcoin would be regulated, with legal protection in place for investment activities.” The regulator added that “at the time the ad appeared it had not featured any risk warning making sufficiently clear to consumers that the value of Bitcoin could go down as well as up, or that the Bitcoin market was unregulated in the UK.”
The advertising watchdog also ruled that the ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 1.3 on social responsibility and 14.1 on financial products. “We concluded that the ad irresponsibly suggested that engaging in Bitcoin investment through Luno was straightforward and easy, particularly given that the audience it addressed, the general public, were likely to be inexperienced in their understanding of cryptocurrencies, and was therefore in breach of the Code,” ASA explained.
ASA ordered that the ad must not appear in its original form as Luno assured that its future ads would feature risk warnings. Luno is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG) and has 7 million customers worldwide, according to Coindesk.
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