Laxmicoin doing rounds not legal tender: Officials

Over the past one week, several Whatsapp messages were doing the rounds asking people in Hyderabad to sign up for Laxmicoin following rumours of a new cryptocurrency by the government. The messages were being sent even when finance minister Arun Jaitely in his Budget speech had said cryptocurrency was not legal tender in the country, but the government would explore its underlying technology, called blockchain. Laxmicoin a digital currency like Bitcoin or Litecoin — run on blockchain technology.

A software engineer Mahender Yadav received a text message asking him to sign up for Laxmicoin, “I received a message saying that the Indian government introduced cryptocurrency and they are giving away 20 free Laxmicoins to everyone who signs up. I signed up and forwarded the message to some of my friends and now my Laxmicoin balance is 640. They did not take any money from me so far.” Laxmicoin developers told

Deccan Chronicle, “We are not buying or selling Laxmicoin, we are going to just airdrop some coins to our registered users and the price for that is zero. We are getting thousands of new users registering every day. We have not taken any money from any user.”

However, CID officials said, “This is a fraud as the government did not recognise any cryptocurrency as legal tender. People should be aware of such scams and false claims. Laxmicoin founders clarified that they were not associated with any government agenda or initiative.