Ripple CTO Warns Community About Scammers

Fraudsters may exploit positive news about the court proceedings against the SEC and the hype around the XRP token, said CTO Ripple’s David Schwartz.

“This ruling has no connection to any airdrops, giveaways or special offers,” Schwartz stressed.

On July 13, the Southern District of New York court issued a ruling in Ripple Labs’ favour in the SEC case. Judge Analisa Torres concluded that sales and other distributions of XRP did not constitute offers and sales of investment contracts.

However, in her view, large-scale distributions of coins to major players in the industry violated U.S. securities laws.

XRP prices reacted positively to the news. In the past 24 hours the token rose by 64.9%, with a current price of $0.77.

According to CoinGecko, the token jumped to fourth place by market capitalization at $40.9 billion. Into the ‘green zone’ entered and other top-10 crypto assets.

Several major crypto exchanges announced plans to resume trading the token for users in the United States.

Schwartz’s warning comes amid multiple fraud incidents. In March 2020 a fake account of Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse was discovered on YouTube. The attackers offered users to send between 2 and 500,000 XRP and supposedly receive in return between 20,000 and 5 million tokens.

In April, Ripple accused the video hosting site of harming its reputation and brand, and in September — willful inaction.

Earlier, Twitter users discovered a fake Google Chrome extension that steals seed phrases for wallet recovery. With it, attackers managed to steal more than 1.4 million XRP.

In September 2022, unknown individuals hacked PwC Venezuela’s Twitter account to promote a fake token airdrop on behalf of Garlinghouse.

Some lawyers warned against celebrating Ripple’s victory in the SEC case too soon.