Over the past several months, the Brad Garlinghouse-led blockchain firm, Ripple has been targeted by fraudsters by creating official-sounding accounts and websites. These malicious entities have once again preyed on the XRP community.
A well-known analytics firm, XRP forensics claimed to have received several reports of XRP-related scams over the weekend.
Ripple’s clarification post on the same, read,
“Beware of the latest giveaway scam: there is a fake email and fraudulent website circulating offering “Community Incentive Programs” or “XRP Incentive Plans.” Neither Ripple, nor any executive of our company, has offered—or ever will offer—free giveaways of digital assets. Any XRP giveaway is not endorsed by, affiliated with, maintained, authorized or sponsored by our company. “
For the last two days, XRP Forensics reportedly received more than 20 victim reports, most of which were theft after the money has already been laundered. The analytics team identified more than 6,000,000 XRP were stolen most likely by the same group.
The mails have reportedly been periodically sent since April-May this year. A mix of leaked databases [Gatehub, old Ripple forums, Coil mail, Ledger] were suspected. Victims were sent fake Ripple emails, while others as fake Coindesk newsletters.
XRP Forensics further noted that this group of fraudsters was operating more professionally when compared to January when they first started out, having learned “some things along the way”.
While hoping that the law enforcement would soon pick up the cases, the analytics platform asserted that connecting the current cases to those of January would indeed be a great lead for investigators. For this particular case, the team also said that owning a hardware wallet is risky for crypto users than not having one as the scammers have now become skilled at siphoning off their coins.
The tweet read,
“The most common denominator of the victims, besides being in various leaked databases, is that they almost all use Ledger hardware wallets. Having a hardware wallet is likely putting people at greater risk than not having one, as phishers know exactly how to target them.”
This news comes nearly a month after a Ledger owner lost 1.1 million XRP to a scam website followed a breach of email and other personal information that happened earlier this year. Many Ledger wallet customers also noticed phishing attempts.
This phishing scam (notice the fake domain lẹdger.com), has already stolen more than 1,150,000 XRP from @Ledger users. Please watch out!
We will follow the money. pic.twitter.com/Q8XD2awdo7
— XRP Forensics (xrplorer.com) (@xrpforensics) November 2, 2020