UK Advertising Watchdog Slaps Arsenal for Misleading Fan Token Ads

The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned on Wednesday two fan token promotions from Arsenal Football Club (Arsenal), alleging that they were misleading. Specifically, one ad is from a Facebook post and the other is from the club's website.

Arsenal launched Fan Tokens in partnership with Socios. Fan Tokens were utility tokens used to encourage fan participation and therefore were materially different to cryptocurrencies which were virtual currencies used as a means of payment, said the Club.

The British advertising authority challenged that both ads were irresponsible because they took advantage of consumers' inexperience or credulity and trivialised investment in cryptoassets, and that both were misleading because they failed to illustrate the risk of the investment. Besides, the ad posted on Facebook did not make clear the "token" was a cryptoasset, which could only be obtained by opening an account and exchanging with another cryptocurrency which had to be purchased.

In mid-December, Fazzaco reported that ASA has cracked down on eToro, Coinbase for running paid 'irresponsible' and 'misleading' ads on online platforms to promote their cryptocurrency services.

In late November, the British regulator was aware that people were concerned about crypto-asset advertising – particularly regarding cryptocurrencies and "non-fungible tokens" (NFTs), and were therefore commenced investigating a number of crypto-asset ads​ across different media.