Following the hacked account’s response to tweets with the hashtag XRP, a phoney giveaway of 100 million tokens is set up, enticing followers to join.
Swindlers compromised the official Twitter account of the Indian Embassy in Oman, swapped out the profile picture with one of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and began spamming users with phishing links pretending to be for a free gift of XRP via the reply tool.
OmanEmbassy_Ind, a Twitter account, exhibited several retweets that were carbon copies of Garlinghouse’s originals. This was supposedly done so that the action wouldn’t look suspicious.
XRP Scam
In response to tweets including the hashtag “XRP,” the compromised account has been promoting a phoney giveaway of 100 million tokens and inviting users to sign up for it. This giveaway is worth about $42 million at today’s XRP price of $0.42.
There is a strong possibility that the same group of hackers who created the fake Ripple XRP CEO known as “Galringhouse” also compromised the Twitter account of the Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX, given the striking similarities between the two fake giveaways.
CoinDCX regained access
On Tuesday, the CoinDCX cryptocurrency exchange revealed that it has once again acquired access to its account. As of press time, the cryptocurrency exchange’s Twitter account had over 230,000 followers, whereas the Embassy of India in Oman’s account showed only 4,119 followers.
After uploading a photo of herself alongside Garlinghouse in the workplace of Ripple Labs on Monday, Caroline Pham, an employee of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission, caused a stir on social media with her candid snapshot.
Following the filing of applications for summary judgement by both parties on Saturday, a judgement may soon be forthcoming in a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging that Ripple’s sales of XRP violated securities laws.
Since the platforms’ inception, a great number of cybercriminals have utilised social media in an effort to defraud naive users out of their cryptocurrency as well as their fiat currency.
The United States Federal Trade Commission estimated in June that con artists had stolen around $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency from 2021 through the first quarter of 2022, with social media platforms being the source of approximately half of all scams using cryptocurrency.
