Scammers pounce as crypto markets touch new all-time highs

Fraudsters and scammers are taking advantage of the recent crypto tailwind to up their attacks on the crypto community, warns Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Garlinghouse said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday that the broader market rally has spurred scammers to impersonate the official Ripple YouTube account and potentially con users.

Losses to crypto scams hit a new record of $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025, beating the previous record set in 2022 of $2 billion and nearly equal to the total losses from all of 2024.

XRP (XRP) surged to $3.66 on July 18, according to Nansen, coming close to the token’s previous 2018 high of $3.84 on Coinbase. Analysts also predict more upside, despite a 10% price retreat to $3.19 in the last 24 hours.

At the same time, Bitcoin (BTC) has registered a more than 7% gain in the last 14 days, and is trading at over $119,000 per coin. Ether (ETH) has spiked over 31% in the last 14 days, and is changing hands for $3,644 per token.

“Like clockwork, with success and market rallies, scammers ramp up their attacks on the crypto community — PLEASE BEWARE of the latest scam targeting the XRP family on YouTube and impersonating Ripple ’s official account!” said Garlinghouse.

“We will keep reporting these – please do the same. As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” he added.

Source: Brad Garlinghouse

Scammers stealing accounts

The official Ripple account on X said the bad actors are doing this by hacking YouTube accounts and updating the page to impersonate Ripple’s official account.

“Reminder: Ripple or our execs will NEVER ask you to send us XRP,” Ripple said.

An X user under the handle XtinaRP said one of these scams was active as of Tuesday and promised a free XRP giveaway to lure victims. It displays the video as being sponsored by Ripple.

An X user reported that a free XRP giveaway scam was active on Tuesday. Source: XtinaRP

“This one looks very convincing. Scammers are using accounts with 176K subs to promote a fake 100M XRP event, Ripple will NEVER conduct giveaways. Stay cautious!” XtinaRP said.

The official Ripple account on YouTube has over 81,000 subscribers. YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ripple sued YouTube over impersonators before

Ripple previously sued YouTube over impersonators in April 2021, seeking damages and accusing the video-sharing site of profiting from the scammers.

One of the cons mentioned in the lawsuit appears similar to the trick the bad actors are using now, a spear-phishing attack, where a user’s account is hacked and its content erased, then set back up masquerading as a prominent cryptocurrency figure shilling a free XRP giveaway.

However, Ripple dropped the lawsuit in March 2021, and Garlinghouse said at the time the crypto firm and YouTube had come to a resolution and agreed to combat the scams together.

Other crypto firms impersonated on Google too

Ripple isn’t the only crypto firm suffering from impersonators. Security firm Scam Sniffer said in an X post on Monday that it had found several direct Google searches related to crypto companies showed scam ads at the top of the results.

“Pro tip for DeFi users: Stop using Google search for crypto sites unless you enjoy playing Russian roulette with your wallet!” Scam Sniffer said.

Source: Scam Sniffer

The bad actors are using Punycode attacks, according to Scam Sniffer, a spoofing technique that exploits how internationalized domain names are displayed in web browsers to appear similar to the real website.

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