The Crypto Press Release Industry Is Mostly Selling Cover to Scams, Data Shows

Press releases exist, in theory, to announce genuine news. In crypto, mounting evidence suggests they're increasingly used to manufacture the appearance of news instead.

A recent analysis by Chainstory examined 2,893 crypto press releases distributed between June and November 2025. The results are damning: 62.5% originated from projects already flagged as high-risk or outright scams, while only 27% could be traced to legitimate operations.

Invert those figures and a pattern emerges. Projects with real substance rarely need to buy their way into the news cycle — journalists come to them. Projects without a credible story have no other option: write it yourself, and pay someone to publish it.

Under that logic, sheer volume becomes a warning sign rather than reassurance. The mechanism the industry built to establish credibility now functions as an inverse signal.

Who actually consumes this content — and, more importantly, who's putting money behind it based on what they read?

Compare that with how press releases traditionally moved: a company sends its announcement to a wire service, the wire service routes it to newsrooms, and journalists independently decide what merits coverage. Editorial judgment filters the flow.

Crypto's distribution model abandoned that structure. For a fee, an announcement can land on 100-plus websites without a single pitch being made — no editor evaluates it, no one asks follow-up questions. The industry brands this "guaranteed placement"; the projects buying it treat it as legitimacy for hire.

"You aren't buying reach, you're buying a veneer of truth," Tal Shmuel Harel of Chainstory said.

What actually fills these distribution pipes bears that out: 74% of releases cover product updates and exchange listings — routine operational updates no traditional newsroom would touch. Just 2% concern events that are genuinely material, such as funding rounds, acquisitions, or substantive research.

Exchanges are heavy users of the format: nearly a quarter of all releases promote listings, trading incentives, or new features, as exchanges compete for token-project business and bundle PR distribution into what they offer.

Cloud mining platforms show the pattern at its most extreme — roughly nine in ten releases from that category originate from operations flagged as high-risk or outright scams, using professional-sounding copy to dress up implausible yield claims.

None of it buys real coverage. What it buys is an "As Seen On" badge, stitched together from Tier-1 outlet names through syndication rather than any actual reporting. Readers assume that if recognizable outlets are attached, someone vetted the claims. Nobody did.

There's a wrinkle most buyers never discover: Google's ranking systems suppress duplicate content. Once a release appears verbatim across dozens of sites, search engines demote nearly all the copies into obscurity — the URLs exist, but almost nobody sees them. Distribution numbers look impressive in a sales deck; in practice they mostly generate trophy links for a landing page and little else.

This is unfolding against a broader collapse in institutional trust — Gallup polling puts confidence in mainstream media at a historic low. Crypto media operates with even fewer checks. Once editorial scrutiny is replaced by an invoicing process, what remains resembles journalism only in form.

None of this is a new invention. Fraudsters have understood for decades that a well-placed press release can move a market faster than any underlying fundamentals — the template predates blockchain entirely.

01A playbook with a long history

Economist Thomas Renault studied SEC enforcement actions against pump-and-dump schemes from 2002 through 2015 and found press releases present in 73.3% of cases — more common than spam email, fake websites, or message-board hype.

The people behind these schemes weren't outside operators, either. Company insiders — CEOs and CFOs — turned up in 60.7% of the cases Renault examined, and paid stock promoters appeared in 49.3%. The line between "issuer" and "fraudster" was frequently nonexistent.

Mark Cuban flagged this dynamic early on. His research outfit, ShareSleuth, sent people to physically check addresses listed in press releases as corporate headquarters. The recurring discovery: no utilities hooked up, no one actually there.

"I used to make a f*** ton of money shorting companies," Cuban said in January 2025, describing how reliably the gap between a release's claims and on-the-ground reality could be exploited.

Even wire services with real verification standards aren't immune. In September 2021, a fabricated press release made its way onto GlobeNewswire claiming Walmart would begin accepting Litecoin as payment. Reuters and CNBC both picked it up, and Litecoin's own account reportedly retweeted it. Litecoin's price jumped 30% within minutes.

Walmart denied any such arrangement, the price gave back its gains, and GlobeNewswire retracted the release, explaining that a fraudulent account had bypassed its verification process. Reuters had been fooled by a wire service that actually maintains compliance procedures — crypto-specific distribution services routinely skip that step entirely.

More recently, on Christmas Eve 2025, a fake platform calling itself "CircleMetals" issued a release claiming a partnership with Circle, the issuer of USDC. It carried fabricated quotes attributed to CEO Jeremy Allaire and used Circle's branding without authorization, and visitors to the site were prompted to connect their wallets — the standard setup for a drainer attack. Circle confirmed the release was fraudulent, but only after it had already circulated.

Hong Kong's JPEX exchange ran a comparable operation over a longer stretch, using press releases throughout 2023 to assert it held licenses and partnerships it did not actually have. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission eventually confirmed publicly that JPEX had never been licensed and hadn't even filed an application. By the time that warning landed, roughly 2,700 victims had lost a combined HK$1.6 billion.

Press releases weren't the origin of any of these schemes. But each one got something newsroom coverage never would have handed it: an unfiltered microphone.

02Influencers and bots complete the loop

Press releases secure the placement; amplification comes from elsewhere. In September 2025, ZachXBT published a leaked spreadsheet listing wallet addresses and rate cards for more than 200 crypto influencers. Rates ranged from $50 to $60,000 per post, though only one influencer commanded the top figure — most clustered well under $10,000. Of the 160-plus accounts that had accepted paid promotions, fewer than five had disclosed the posts as advertising.

The pipeline runs cleanly: a project pays for press release distribution, headlines appear across dozens of sites, and paid influencers then share those same headlines with followers — who read the coverage as independent validation of something "already in the news," unaware that neither step involved real scrutiny.

FTC rules require "clear and conspicuous" disclosure of paid endorsements, with fines of up to $53,088 per violation. In practice, enforcement has leaned almost entirely on warning letters rather than penalties. Securities-law violations fall to the SEC, advertising violations to the FTC, and crypto influencer promotions often qualify as both — yet only one of the two agencies has shown much appetite for pursuing cases.

The rare instances that made headlines came from the SEC: Kim Kardashian paid $1.26 million in 2022; Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled settled in 2018; Steven Seagal followed in 2020. Four cases across seven years, while undisclosed promotion remained the industry default throughout.

Taylor Monahan, lead project manager at MetaMask, put it bluntly in a 2022 CNBC interview: "I am viciously opposed to all partnerships with crypto influencers. I would urge anyone, even if they consider themselves legitimate, to not form these sort of faux partnerships."

Camila Russo built The Defiant explicitly as a counterweight to that pay-to-play ecosystem. Her assessment of crypto media today: "A lot of crypto journalism is just paid advertisement that isn't being disclosed. We get so many pitches every day from people who want to pay for articles and are asking for that to not be disclosed." Legitimate reporters are still working in this space, she notes — they're just competing against a flood of paid content engineered to look identical to what they produce.

Bot networks add a final layer of illusion. Services sell customizable fake engagement — likes, followers, comments — engineered to make a post with thousands of interactions look organically popular, which then prompts platform algorithms to surface it further and pull in genuine attention.

This fake-engagement layer feeds directly into larger fraud operations. Crypto scams are estimated to have drained $17 billion in 2025 alone. Operations that purchase bulk social media accounts prove 238 times more effective than those that don't, and AI-assisted scams now extract 4.5 times more money than traditional approaches. The same Chainalysis research puts year-over-year growth in impersonation scams at roughly 1,400%.

The full chain: a press release creates a headline, an influencer amplifies it, bots simulate validation, and retail investors perceive a consensus that was never actually there.

03The scale of what's collapsing

CoinGecko's tally, published in January 2026, found that 53.2% of all cryptocurrency tokens created since 2021 are now dead — not inactive, not dormant, simply gone.

The pace of failure accelerated sharply. 2021 recorded 2,584 token failures; by 2024 that annual figure had climbed to 1.38 million. Then 2025 alone saw 11.6 million tokens collapse — 86% of every recorded failure in crypto's history, concentrated into a single year. Q4 2025 accounted for 7.7 million of those failures on its own, with October's $19 billion leveraged-position liquidation cascade sweeping out much of what remained on the margins.

The total number of tracked projects grew from 428,383 at the close of 2021 to more than 20 million by December 2025, a surge driven largely by low-effort launchpads such as Pump.fun and its many imitators, which let anyone mint a token in minutes.

Minting a token became trivial. Manufacturing the appearance of legitimacy remained the actual bottleneck — one that press release distribution solved at scale. Which loops back to the earlier figure: 62% of these releases originate from high-risk or scam projects, suggesting the distribution industry isn't incidentally serving fraud so much as built around it.

Regulatory response hasn't kept pace. SEC enforcement actions totaled $4.98 billion in crypto-related penalties during fiscal year 2024. A more recent report from Cornerstone Research found the SEC brought only 13 crypto-related actions in 2025, totaling $142 million in penalties — a 60% drop from the 33 actions filed in 2024, under a new administration and a reshaped commission.

As enforcement has pulled back, the gray areas it once policed have only widened. Press releases remain legal as long as required disclosure labels are attached; liability sits with the issuer rather than the distributor, and wire services collect their fee regardless of outcome.

11.6 million tokens died in the past year. A large share of them had press releases behind them, influencer threads promoting them, and engagement numbers that looked convincing enough on the surface.

04Who the machine actually serves

None of this is likely to win popularity contests. Wire services sell distribution packages, influencers sell access to their audiences, and projects pay for both — pointing at the machine means pointing at other people's revenue.

But the underlying numbers aren't a constructed narrative — they're data: 62% of crypto press releases traced back to high-risk or scam projects, and 11.6 million tokens dead in a single year. That second figure isn't alarmism. It's a body count.

Tal Shmuel Harel and Chainstory published this research knowing it would make plenty of the industry uncomfortable. Camila Russo built The Defiant around the idea that journalism shouldn't involve taking payment to say nice things. ZachXBT continues exposing paid influencer promotion schemes, harassment notwithstanding.

One practical suggestion: checking ZachXBT's feed and its replies before trusting a project or influencer can serve as a useful, low-cost first check.

For what it's worth, this outlet has not accepted payment to promote any project discussed here — the DMs offering as much do arrive, and get ignored.

Editorial scrutiny exists for a reason: reporters ask questions, editors check claims, publishers put their own reputations on the line for accuracy. That process is imperfect, but the friction it creates is exactly what scams struggle to survive. Pay-to-play distribution removes that friction by design — which is the point, not an oversight.

Press releases were built to inform the public about material developments. Somewhere along the way, crypto turned the format into a machine for manufacturing the appearance of consensus — credibility without merit, coverage without scrutiny, trust that was never actually earned.

The underlying signal still holds, just inverted: projects with real substance draw journalists on their own, while projects without it buy the placement instead. The more press releases pouring out of a single source, the more skepticism that volume probably deserves.