MailChimp, one of the biggest email service providers in the world, announced it was prohibiting its users to use the platform to promote initial coin offerings (ICOs) and cryptocurrencies because they present a danger to the safety of the users.
Due to the enormous popularity of the cryptocurrencies and the ICOs, many fraudulent operations and scams have proliferated as well. There were initial coin offerings whose organizers later vanished with the money raised during the campaign and other scams and this led to the decision of MailChimp to ban the promotion of the ICOs and the cryptocurrencies on its platform.
The official announcement from MailChimp says the following: “We cannot allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities.”
Likewise, in an email sent to its clients, MailChimp assured the cryptocurrencies and the ICOs were too frequently associated with frauds, phishing and potentially fraudulent trading practices. Moreover, the company pointed out that this new measure will enter into force on April 30th, 2018 and recommended to the users to take measures in the next days.
MailChimp is an email marketing company founded in 2001. It has headquarters in the city of Atlanta in the United States of America and currently has more than 20 million clients in numerous countries around the world. The idea to create an email service came from a failed online greeting card project that also used a chimpanzee as a logo and was run by Dan Kurzius and Glen Chestnut. From 2009 onwards, the email marketing business started to grow and became successful.
In its Acceptable Use Policy, MailChimp does not allow the use of the platform to promote multi-level marketing, escort and dating services, pharmaceutical products, gambling services, pornography or work from home opportunities. Nevertheless, Glen Chestnut, the CEO of MailChimp, said the email marketing platform was willing to help new companies.
On the other hand, ProtonMail, a company from Switzerland, last year decided to allow its users to pay for its premium services with Bitcoin, by using a simple interface for making quick and transparent payments. The payment system was designed to convert the transactions in bitcoins to ProtonMail credits, which can then be used to pay invoices for the services offered by the platform.
