4 Reasons Scammers Keep Coming at Ripple

TL;DR

• The growth of the cryptocurrency market resulted in a skyrocketing number of scam attempts, many of which are highly successful for the bad actors.
• Ripple’s ecosystem is among the most targeted, and here are some of the possible reasons behind this.

Brief Scam History and Recent Targets

Cryptocurrency scams are nothing new, they have been employed by fraudsters for years. However, they tend to pick up in times when the market is going through the roof, as has been the case for the past several months. In general, the more attention people pay to crypto, the more it is expected that bad actors will search for victims.

Arguably, the most utilized type of scam involves offering to double someone’s tokens by sending a certain amount to an address. As expected, the sender never receives the promised profit, nor even their initial funds.

Of course, there are others, like Ponzi schemes, pump-and-dumps, and rug pulls, but the ones we will focus on in this article do not fall under that category, as they use an already established and well-known brand or a public figure to impersonate them and lure victims in.

Throughout the years, many crypto projects and their communities have been targeted, with scams ranging from hacked Twitter accounts (at the time) promising free BTC to deep fakes of prominent figures such as Elon Musk, Charles Hoskinson, Changpeng Zhao, and Brad Garlinghouse.

The last one, in fact, issued a vital warning for Ripple, its investors, and its community, earlier this month. Scammers used YouTube as their main platform to impersonate Ripple’s official account and executives to promote various frauds.

XRP Army Under Attack: Why So?

One of the possible reasons behind the scam attacks against Ripple and its community is its size – it’s one of the most vocal parts of the entire cryptocurrency space, while the native token has been in the top 10 and 5 digital assets for years. Currently, it’s the third-largest, with a market cap of close to $200 billion. This makes it a prime candidate to be exploited by bad actors.

XRP holders are frequently expecting big news, such as partnership announcements with large banks, impactful updates like the ISO 20022, spot ETF approvals in the States, or new developments on the legal case against the SEC, which started well over four years ago. This also opens the door for creative scams that could dupe investors with something like “Ripple wins SEC case – XRP airdrop now live, claim tokens here.”

Speaking of giveaway scams, they are easy to create and promote on various social media channels. Fraudsters often use actual clips of real Ripple events or interviews to layer a fake giveaway – “send 1,000 XRP to this address and receive 2,000 XRP back.”

These scams appear polished, typically run via livestream loops, and utilize XRP’s lower price ($3 compared to BTC’s $120,000 and ETH’s $4,000) to lure smaller investors into participating, with the hope of multiplying their holdings.

The last possible reason is slightly related to the first, as it aims to capitalize on Ripple’s popularity. The company and its native token are frequently trending on platforms like Google, X, and YouTube, which allows scammers to exploit this search traffic by creating fake SEO-optimized videos, thumbnails, and livestreams.

This concludes our article on why Ripple might be under constant fire, especially as its native token just charted a new all-time high. Investors should trust only the official channels of all projects they are interested in, not just Ripple, double- and triple-check everything before engaging with them, and beware that when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.