Ripple Former CTO Warns of Robinhood Email Phishing Scam Ahead Q1 Earnings

In the lead-up to Robinhood’s first-quarter earnings report, Ripple’s former CTO David Schwartz, has warned of a highly targeted phishing scam. The exploit is targeting Robinhood customers via emails.

Ex-Ripple CTO Sounds Alarm On Robinhood Phishing Scam

After earlier debunking the “secret plan” hype around XRP, Ripple’s Schwartz has now highlighted an ongoing exploit for Robinhood users. In a post on X, he wrote, “WARNING: Any emails you get that appear to be from Robinhood (and may actually be from their email system) are phishing attempts.”

He provided an example of an authentic-looking email with Robinhood branding. Moreover, the email had a button that reads “Review Activity Now” to respond to “unrecognized activity.”

The sample email includes a login alert with information such as the time, device and a case ID, followed by a red warning box to review changes. Although legitimate-looking, the button on the email appears to lead to a phishing sequence, per the Ripple exec’s post.

Interestingly, the authentication checks in the background in the screenshot reveal that SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passed. These indicators are used to confirm authenticity and since they approve of the email, it poses greater threat to the users unaware of the scam.

On how this is possible, Schwartz replied, “I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but it seems like these emails were somehow injected into Robinhood’s actual email infrastructure.” Thus, the Ripple CTO Emeritus later characterized the attack as “quite sneaky.”

He referenced Cubby Law CFO Abdel Sabbah’s insight into the attack. Sabbah said hackers set up a Robinhood account via Gmail’s “dot trick” and name their device with a malicious HTML payload.

Rabbit Hood’s email allegedly doesn’t sanitize the field, so the HTML is rendered in a legitimate system email. The end result is a realistic phishing email from noreply@robinhood.com with proper authentication.

Robinhood Earnings & Legal Battle

Ripple exec’s alert comes ahead of Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) reporting its earnings on Tuesday, April 28. Analysts are expecting revenue of around $1.15 billion for the first quarter and $1.25 billion for the next quarter.

In terms of earnings, Zacks Investment Research analysts are expecting earnings per share (EPS) of $0.40 for this quarter. If achieved, it will mark an uptick of 8.11% year-over-year.

However, the HOOD stock has been under pressure in the pre-market session today. It fell slightly amid news of the phishing attack and the Wisconsin lawsuit against prediction markets.

Earlier, Robinhood shares jumped as the firm announced a $75 million deal with OpenAI.

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