Ripple Labs Issues Important Warning To Community On Scam Tactics

Crypto payment platform Ripple Labs Inc. has issued another warning to its community, reminding them to remain cautious of phishing links and Deepfakes. 

Basis for The Ripple Labs Warning

For context, Ripple shared a demonstration video on X to show how certain scammers have been impersonating key members of the firm like Brad Garlinghouse, its CEO.  

According to the illustrations in the demo, bad actors clone the image, voice and even gestures of their target individual to gain the trust of unsuspecting victims.

Next, they promise Ripple users a XRP giveaway or even a XRP-doubling program. These fake giveaways are valued as high as 500-1000 XRP tokens with 1 XRP worth $0.6114, according to the market price of the coin at the time of this writing.

BREAKING: @Ripple will never ask you to send us XRP. Ever.
Neither will Brad, David, Monica, Stu, or anyone from Ripple.

Learn how to protect yourself from scams: https://t.co/ikEFe4uf3r pic.twitter.com/No20jwLh9g

— Ripple (@Ripple) April 11, 2024

On this premise, Ripple Labs has called the attention of of its community to the fact that the company will never make such request from its users. In addition to this statement, the crypto firm also clarified that neither its CEO Garlinghouse nor any of those individuals that are associated with Ripple will ask users to transfer their XRP to be doubled.

Ripple and its executive have reiterated that all approved messages will only be passed through official Ripple accounts.

XRP Scammers Leveraging AI Tools

This scam threat within the Ripple ecosystem has been on for a while. Towards the end of 2023, Garlinghouse was seen on his social media pages talking to his followers about the menace of deepfake videos impersonating him. 

In the said video that was posted on YouTube, the Ripple CEO was seen trying to convince XRP holders to participate in a non-existent giveaway. While watching such Deepfake videos, vigilant viewers may notice some irregularities in the mouth movement. 

Oftentimes, these videos could be results from curated prompts fed to trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) models like OpenAI’s Voice Engine or even Sora, the revolutionary tool that can create videos from textual descriptions. 

With how advanced and complex the AI industry is getting, XRP holders would require more than deciphering irregular mouth movements to fish out a phishing scam or a Deepfake video. The firm’s caution might serve as a key awareness campaign that can save someone later.