An article breathlessly described how Hanad Hassan's turned a $50 investment into $8 million, but investors in his token have claimed that it is a scam.
The BBC has quietly dropped a documentary into a British man who became a millionaire trading cryptocurrencies, amid allegations that a coin he created turned out to be a scam.
In an article that has since been taken down, the broadcaster told the story of Hanad Hassan — describing how he turned a $50 investment into $8 million within the space of a year.
The piece went on to say that the 20-year-old "wants to use his wealth to help people" — and that the cryptocurrency he established has already spent $270,000 on good causes.
Although the BBC doesn't reveal the name of his project, he was listed as the founder of OrfanoX, which said one of its main goals "was to provide a safe token amongst all of the scams that are going on."
A Telegram group for OrfanoX reveals that the token was discontinued back in October, blaming this on the departure of its chief operations officer, and community mods who "decided to dump their bags." That message had added:
"The BSC space right now is full of elonshibarockets and everyone aims for a 2/3x and leaves."
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Allegations Made
Around this time, those who had invested in Orfano said that they were unable to take their money out. One person on Twitter wrote:
"To all Orfano investors: we will be making a claim against Action Fraud and the police about this scam. Using a rebrand/relaunch to pump the price and then 'discontinue' it is criminal."
It appears that investors started to have difficulties when a token swap was announced that would convert Orfano tokens into OrfanoX.
The Telegram group also suggests that the BBC documentary had been in the works for some time — not least because it was also being discussed before the project closed last October. This revelation may have given some investors false hope about the project. One wrote:
"I'm quite sure that the BBC has done its due diligence and investigated OrfanoX and the team to the core — the BBC would not waste its reputation, time and money (including the salaries of employees involved in the documentary) if OrfanoX wasn't doing something special, maybe even big."
The BBC's programme was meant to be part of a "Bossing It" series that highlighted successful entrepreneurs around the country.
But the broadcaster will now face questions over how much due diligence it actually performed into the project, and into Hassan's work in the past.
According to the OrfanoX website, a 3% cut from every transaction was earmarked for charitable giving. Screenshots posted on Discord suggested that $10,000 was given to Save The Children, as well as $13,500 to a fund helping India during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CoinMarketCap has reached out to Hassan, as well as the BBC, for a comment.
