Press release falsely claims Kroger planned to accept Bitcoin Cash

American grocery retail giant Kroger has debunked reports that it will begin accepting Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a payment option in its outlets nationwide.

According to Reuters, a spokesperson for the company said that a press release appearing on the company’s website about accepting Bitcoin Cash from December was fake. As of the time of writing, the fictitious release is still up on Kroger’s investor page with a quote attributed to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen.

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This is reminiscent of another story that broke in September about Walmart partnering with Litecoin (LTC) that later turned out to be false. In the Walmart case, the people responsible reportedly registered a fake domain name which was later spotted as a spoof of the original corporate name.

When the Walmart news broke, it pumped Litecoin by over 30% from $175 to $231 before crashing when the story was revealed to be false. In contrast, today’s news barely impacted the price of BCH with only a 5% move occurring a few minutes before Kroger’s swift denial of the story.

About Author

Osato is a news reporter at The Block as part of the crypto ecosystems team that focuses on DAO governance, staking, blockchain layers, and DeFi. He was previously a news reporter at Cointelegraph. Based in Lagos, Nigeria, he enjoys crosswords, poker, and attempting to beat his Scrabble high score. Follow him on Twitter at @OsatoNomayo.