Last updated on May 18th, 2024 at 12:27 pm
Ripple CTO, David Schwartz has warned users and investors about a fake website promising XRP airdrop of up to 100,000,000 tokens. As the Ripple community still celebrates a victory in the legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), scammers are taking advantage by luring naive users into phishing scams.
In his tweet, Schwartz cautions users of the website “holdxrp . com” which claims to offer an airdrop pool of 100,000,000 XRP to every Ripple user.
CAUTION: holdxrp . com is a scam site.
— David "JoelKatz" Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 21, 2023
The website has a Medium-like interface with a fake post from Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse promising this airdrop event to celebrate the “global power of XRP.” Also, the announcement contains some phishing links that are supposed to direct users to where they can secure these airdrops.
Clicking on such links can cause unforeseen harm to users’ funds. Interestingly, the blog post generated a fake 5,236 claps with a series of fake comments from users claiming they had received their own rewards.
Related Reading: There Will be no Money for Years If Ripple Loses to SEC, John Deaton Says
Looking at the above image, the comment section has some fake comments from prominent names in the crypto industry like Ben Armstrong (BitBoy Crypto), Crypto Rover, and Carm From The Moon.
Schwartz consistently speaks up against crypto scams
Meanwhile, Ripple’s chief technical officer Schwartz quickly cautions the community about the potential harm of such scams stressing that users should be vigilant and avoid clicking on any suspicious website that offers rewards that are too good to be true.
Furthermore, the Ripple CTO is known to always speak out loud on the rise of fake airdrop scams and general crypto scams in the community. In March this year, he shared his idea of calling out scams via a thread on his Twitter account.
In his time representing Ripple, Schwartz has consistently cautioned users that Ripple is not doing any airdrops and that they should be skeptical of any such claims made by dubious sources.
Ultimately, users should be able to identify legitimate promotions by checking if they come from verified platforms linked to Ripple, if they don’t, then they are most likely fake.
