According to Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, scammers and fraudsters are increasing their attacks on the crypto community by using the current crypto tailwind.
Garlinghouse stated in a message posted on X on Wednesday that the larger market rise has prompted criminals to spoof the official Ripple YouTube channel and potentially defraud users.
Almost equivalent to the entire losses from 2024, losses from cryptocurrency scams reached a new high of $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025, surpassing the previous record of $2 billion established in 2022.
According to Nansen, XRP rose to $3.66 on July 18, nearly reaching its previous high of $3.84 on Coinbase in 2018. Even though the price has dropped 10% to $3.19 in the past day, analysts still anticipate additional growth.
At the same time, Bitcoin is trading at over $119,000 per coin, having gained more than 7% in the last 14 days. In the past 14 days, ether has increased by more than 31%, and each token is now trading for $3,644.
Like clockwork, scammers intensify their attacks on the cryptocurrency community in response to market rallies and success. “Please be aware of the latest scam targeting the XRP family on YouTube and impersonating Ripple’s official account!” Garlinghouse said.
“We will continue to report these; kindly follow suit. “As usual, if something seems too good to be true, it most likely is,” he continued.
Scammers stealing accounts
According to X’s official Ripple account, the malicious actors are impersonating Ripple’s official account by stealing YouTube accounts and changing the page.
“Just so you know, neither Ripple nor our executives will ever ask you to send us XRP,” Ripple stated.
According to an X user using by the name XtinaRP, one of these scams was operational as of Tuesday. To entice victims, the user offered a free XRP gift. It shows that Ripple is the video’s sponsor.
This one appears to be rather realistic. Ripple will never hold giveaways, and scammers are utilizing accounts with 176K subscribers to advertise a phony 100M XRP event. Be careful! XtinaRP said.
There are more than 81,000 subscribers to the official Ripple YouTube account. A request for comment was not immediately answered by YouTube.
In April 2021, Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube for impersonators, claiming the video-sharing platform was making money off of the con artists and seeking damages.
A spear phishing attempt, in which a user’s account is compromised and its contents deleted, then re-established under the guise of a well-known cryptocurrency personality encouraging a free XRP giveaway, seems to be a similar tactic to the one described in the case.
However, the case was abandoned by Ripple in March 2021, and according to Garlinghouse, the cryptocurrency company and YouTube had reached an agreement at that time to work together to fight the frauds.
On Google, other cryptocurrency companies also impersonated
Ripple is not the only cryptocurrency company that has to deal with imposters. In an X post on Monday, security company Scam Sniffer said that it had discovered that scam advertisements appeared at the top of numerous direct Google searches pertaining to cryptocurrency organizations.
“Pro tip for DeFi users: Stop using Google search for crypto sites unless you enjoy playing Russian roulette with your wallet!” Scam Sniffer commented.
According to Scam Sniffer, the fraudulent actors are employing Punycode assaults, a spoofing method that takes advantage of the way internationalized domain names are presented in web browsers to mimic the actual website looking.
