Did McDonald's put up this billboard to hire 'crypto bros'?

We came across this image being shared on a Singapore-based Telegram group:

The left side of the image is a collage of screenshots from Reddit and Twitter talking about the collapse of the “terra/luna crypto”, while the right side of the image is what appears to be a billboard put up by fast food giant McDonald’s with the words “Hey Crypto Bro’s, we are hiring” (sic) on it.

For some context, TerraUSD (“UST”) is a stablecoin operating on the Terra blockchain. The Terra ecosystem also operates the cryptocurrency LUNA. While the LUNA was ranked among the top 10 cryptocurrencies, this changed after the UST collapsed last week, triggering the plunge in value of sister coin LUNA as well.

As predicted, investors who have sunk large amounts of money into the cryptocurrency have been badly burned, with some even reporting a loss of their life savings. The outpouring of concern regarding the crash had even prompted moderators of the r/TerraLuna sub-Reddit to pin a post with helpline numbers to the top of the page.

Investments always come with risks, but if anything, the recruitment advertisement targeting cryptocurrency adopters (“Crypto Bros”) is especially cruel to those who have lost a significant amount of money due to the crash.

Not the first time this ‘advertisement’ has appeared

When we did a search of the keywords “mcdonalds crypto bros billboard”, we were led to a factcheck on Snopes published earlier this year.

Mid-2021, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Ethereum saw their values briefly plummet, and similar to the Terra/LUNA situation, investors were left either badly burned or extremely concerned about their portfolios. Around then, a supposed screenshot of a tweet sent by McDonald’s was being circulated on social media:

When Snopes did a check on McDonald’s Twitter timeline, they were unable to find a record of the alleged tweet. A check on archives also failed to bring up any proof of it ever existing.

Following this, the image of the alleged McDonald’s recruitment billboard also began circulating on social media.

However, Snopes debunked the legitimacy of the image, clarifying that the image was actually created by digitally editing a photograph of a busy intersection in Poland that was taken by Flickr user Kuba Bożanowski in 2009.

Below is a side-by-side comparison that Snopes created: