The UK’s advertising regulator has launched an investigation into ads urging people to buy the cryptocurrency Floki Inu (FLOKI). The ads, entitled “Missed $Doge? Get $Floki” were displayed on buses and in the London Underground, among other places.
The Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) has recently launched an investigation into advertisements on London’s public transport system. For the past few weeks, posters featuring the cryptocurrency Floki Inu (FLOKI) have been displayed on buses and the underground in the UK capital.
The ASA’s investigation follows claims by London Assembly member Sian Berry that cryptocurrency ads should be banned on the capital’s public transport system. She said they “have no place on the public transport network and are not ethical”.
For their part, the team behind the Floki Inu advertising campaign said that the ads were “legally permitted”, adding that they also included a clear warning about the associated risk and volatility of cryptocurrencies in general.
At present, it is mainly Transport For London (TFL), which runs London’s transport system, that is being blamed. According to the ASA, it was up to them to sound the alarm even before the advertising campaign was launched. A statement shared by the member of the London Assembly
With the words “this is completely unregulated, you can lose all your money”, they should have thought twice. [This should have raised a red flag, and someone at TFL should have looked at this ad before it was approved,” added Sian Berry.
FLOKI, a new memecoin in trend
This ad, entitled “Missed $Doge? Get $Floki”, is clearly trying to seduce investors who missed the meteoric rise of Dogecoin (DOGE) by promising them an equivalent fate for FLOKI.
Floki ad posted on a London bus (Source: Twitter)
Dogecoin-derived memecoins have been one of the trends in the cryptocurrency market in 2021. While many of these projects have failed to reach the core community, some, like Shiba Inu (SHIB), have taken the market by storm and even managed the feat of surpassing DOGE in the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Floki Inu is just such a cryptocurrency created in the hope of riding the wave of hype surrounding Dogecoin. The basics are simple: a tweet from Elon Musk last June explaining that his dog, a Shiba Inun would be named Floki. Since then, FLOKI has an ERC20 and BEP20 token and a capitalization of over $1.7 billion.
