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Since the Chinese regulator’s announcement of China’s DC/EP initiative, which stands for “Digital Currency / Electronic Payments”, the term DCEP has taken a whole new life of its own in the speculators market.

When the initiative was first disclosed by the People’s Bank of China in August this year, the bank also mentioned that it will speed up the pace of research and development of the digital currency.

And just seven days after the announcement, the central bank issued a risk announcement reminding citizens of “fraudulent use of the People’s Bank to issue or promote digital currency”. They specified that they have not even issued the legal digital currency and has not authorized any institutions or enterprises to issue legal digital currency, and there are no promotion teams out there.

Even at that point, the market and frankly the whole world has been awakened up to the initial DCEP announcement, and the hype about it has also become out of control. For one, some exchanges have launched a digital asset trading pair with a token referred to as “DCEP”. While others have also issued ERC20 tokens called “DCEP” on the Ethereum public chain.

So now when you search for DCEP tokens, you get many options in the search bar. The only appropriate reaction we have for this is: ??????

As a result of such market franticness, the central bank had to deny these rumors multiple times, and is also determined to send a clear message to the naturally speculative audience in China, reminding them that the so-called “DCEP” token in the market is not the legal digital currency.

To think that was the end, there are further scams that even impersonated the DCEP payment channel interface.

Since October this year, when President Xi labeled blockchain as one of the main focuses in the country’s technology initiative, the speculative sentiment shot back immediately.

Type the keyword “DCEP Download” in the Chinese search engine Baidu, and you get about 516,000 results. The highest ranked link is introduced as “DCEP Payment – Digital Currency Electronic Payment Interface Platform”.

When you click through that link and enter the home page, the center of the page shows a timer countdown, with a short introduction: “Working hard to build… The application interface will soon be open.” The website does not specify what exactly is under construction.

On top of the countdown, the center section is accompanied by a popup that diverts you to a registration portal. The platform claims that if you register, you get to receive a DCEP coupon of some sort.

You may be surprised, but this types of platform really work on the un-educated retail folks.

What is more daring from some of the exchanges, for example, is one such company called rosex.io claims that they have directly listed the DE/CP.

On October 7, the Rosex platform announced that DC/EP was officially launched on the platform.

According to the official website, the Rosex Exchange is a digital asset trading platform established on October 1, 2018. However, somehow the site is no longer accessible.

These are just a few of the examples of what businesses have done to scam retail. Not only are some of the tokens’ names related to DCEP , but some Android App’s sites have also appeared directly to use the DCEP abbreviation in the App software name and description. This directly led to the Chinese crypto media account shutdowns and ban of certain crypto words cases in the App Stores, as we reported previously.

The issuing of scam tokens, websites, and online app is going to be endless, while overall we think the outcome will be a better, healthier crypto and digital currency adoption market. Nevertheless, the internet crackdowns as such will continue. We think it’s only part of natural selection in the race for China to compete for global digital power.