The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint against a cricket club for a social media post promoting cryptoassets.
Essex County Cricket Club posted on Twitter, now X, in May advertising non fungible tokens for the company FanCraze Technologies.
When challenged by the ASA, Essex County Cricket Club said they had a partnership with FanCraze and apologised for failing to disclose the Tweet as advertising.
The club deleted the post and assured all future adverts would comply with the rules.
FanCraze Technologies also acknowledged the post should have been correctly labelled as advertising and claimed it would carry out “comprehensive training sessions” for staff and partners.
As well as challenging whether the post was “obviously identifiable as a marketing communication”, the regulator looked at whether the advert made it clear which cryptowallet a prospective buyer would need in order to receive a token.
Another complainant challenged whether the post was misleading as it did not make clear it was referring to an investment product or that transaction fees applied; and that it failed to illustrate the risk of the investment - namely that the value could go down as well as up.
The ASA upheld all four complaints against the post and both parties were told the ad must never appear again in its current form.
The ASA added: “We also told FanCraze to ensure their advertising made clear the risks of NFTs by stating that they were an unregulated cryptoasset which required a cryptowallet and that their value could go down as well as up and included all material information regarding fees and the limitations of owning NFTs on a proprietary system.”
The FCA took over the regulation of adverts relating to cryptoasets in October, but the new rules do not cover cryptoassets that are non-fungible, such as the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) seen in this advert.
Essex County Cricket club declined to comment further on the case and FanCraze did not respond to a request for comment.
tara.o'connor@ft.com
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