More than six in 10 crypto press releases published between June and November 2025 came from projects flagged as “high risk” or scams, according to a Chainstory report. The crypto communications firm analyzed 2,893 press releases, categorizing issuers by risk and scoring announcements based on tone and substance.
The report found that 62.5% of releases were linked to high-risk activity or scams. Product or feature updates and trading or listing announcements made up 74% of the releases. Chainstory flagged high-risk releases for signs such as unrealistic yield promises and copy-pasted websites.
“Incomplete data alone never pushed an issuer beyond medium risk. We escalated a project to high risk only when we identified multiple independent red flags,” Tal Shmuel Harel, co-founder of Chainstory, told Cointelegraph.
High-risk projects accounted for 35.6% of all releases and scams 26.9%; low-risk projects published 27% of the releases analyzed. Chainstory said legitimate projects tend to rely less on mass press release distribution because they attract organic media coverage or prefer targeted communications, while higher-risk projects are more likely to flood the wires.
Exchanges were heavy users of mass distribution: nearly a quarter of releases were tied to trading activity, token listings or promotional campaigns. The tactic often involves distributing the same announcement across multiple wires and syndication services—so-called shotgun distribution. Chainstory noted search engines tend to suppress duplicate content: when near-identical releases appear across the web, most placements are filtered out of search results, leaving only one or two indexed versions visible. “If you shotgun-distribute one press release, which gets syndicated dozens of times to third-party websites, Google will most likely hide a big chunk of the duplicated content,” Harel said.
Promotion, user acquisition and brand awareness are standard business activities, but past enforcement cases link malicious press releases and promotional campaigns to market manipulation by insiders and paid advocates. Chainstory referenced SEC enforcement patterns to argue that “cheap talk (press releases) can move prices.” A 2017 working paper by economist Thomas Renault analyzed SEC pump-and-dump cases from 2002 to 2015 and found press releases were the most common channel for misleading claims, appearing in 73.3% of cases.
The report noted instances where press releases affected markets or bypassed editorial barriers. In 2021 a false release saying Walmart had started accepting Litecoin caused a roughly 30% price spike before Walmart denied the claim. On Christmas Eve 2025 a platform impersonating Circle, issuer of the USDC stablecoin, issued a fake press release about a new platform that prompted visitors to connect crypto wallets; the fraudulent site was later taken down. Press releases have also been used to build false legitimacy over time: a July 2023 release by the now-defunct exchange JPEX announced a partnership and presented the platform as licensed; two months later Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission warned the exchange was not licensed, and JPEX became central to a major fraud case.
Before crypto’s mainstream rise, press releases were already common in manipulation of thinly traded assets. Chainstory’s report found a similar pattern in crypto, where cheap distribution and weak gatekeeping make press releases an easy channel for risky projects to push narratives. When most press release activity comes from high-risk projects and scams, volume ceases to be a credibility signal and instead reflects who is most willing to seek attention.
Press releases remain important for communicating official information to the public. The problem is not the format but how easily it can be exploited alongside limited scrutiny and frictionless distribution.
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