The shares of Swedish technology firm Fingerprint Cards went up by 50% after on October 11 a phony press release was posted on the company’s website. The Financial Times reported that it was saying that Samsung Electronics intended to buy Fingerprint Cards for $650 million. On the news, the Swedish company’s market cap increased to $619 million, but after a rapid jump in prices, all Fingerprint trades were canceled.
On the same day, Fingerprint Cards disproved the information about the deal, which was never going to happen. In a special note to the shareholders, the company wrote that the publication about the acquisition by Samsung, distributed by public relations firm Cision, was a fraud. Fingerprint Cards assured that it will call the police for investigation of the incident. Moreover, the company will complain to Finansinspektionen, the Swedish finance regulator.
As mass media say, it was a very inconvenient case for Fingerprint Cards, as one of the company’s fields of activity is development of security systems. It works with biometric technologies, which are applied, for instance, to identify mobile devices users via fingerprint scanning. By the way, the iPhone latest version has a fingerprint sensor embedded.
