8.5M XRP cashed out in 2019-2020 through ‘giveaway scams’

“Brad Garlinghouse CEO RIPPLE – 50 000 000 XRP GIVEAWAY!”

These words have been responsible for looting thousands of XRP users. There have been thousands of such posts attached to random tweets on Twitter, all of them trying to mislead people into participating in scam activities while providing them a lousy, fake front that apes Ripple. In fact, according to data provided by XRP data aggregator ‘xrplorer.com,’ 6 million XRP was withdrawn from exchanges and sent for the purpose of giveaway scams. This is an interesting observation since this figure was close to 3 million XRP in 2020.

Source: xrplorer.com

Among the popular exchanges, Coinbase was used most, followed by Binance, Bitstamp, and Coincheck. Approximately 8.5 million XRP was cashed out by these scams through exchanges and swap services. Further, these exchanges have been asked to look into an advisory list prepared by the data aggregator, one warning its users about such incidents.

However, despite the hordes of cryptocurrency projects in the space, XRP users have been known to be prime targets of con artists. Such scams, once common on Twitter, have now spread to other platforms like YouTube as well. Such incidents were recently brought to the attention of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and YouTube; however, the platforms failed to take any measures to prevent such activities.

Further, just recently, a fake “Ripple Inc.” page uploaded a video claiming to giveaway 50 million XRP through airdrops. This video was viewed by over 14k people and according to data researcher Leonidas Hadjiloizou, the channel had 342,000 subscribers. xrplorer claimed that the XRP accounts associated with such “giveaway” scams possess almost 5.9 million XRP, with a large amount laundered every day.

In fact, following the spurt in such cases, Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube due to its “deliberate and inexplicable failure to address a pervasive and injurious fraud” on its platform.

Meanwhile, other social media platforms like Twitter have been pulled up numerous times by prominent personalities in the space to take action against such scams. Alas, little to none has been done by the platform. Whatever the future of the lawsuit is, it could turn out to be a much-needed step towards preventing online frauds, while formulating stricter monitoring policies.