Ripple CEO Sounds Alarm as Fake XRP Giveaways Spread on YouTube
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has warned that scammers are once again targeting the XRP community, this time by impersonating Ripple on YouTube and promoting fake giveaway events.
Community member Xtina George was among the first to flag the scam, noting that YouTube channels with over 170,000 subscribers are pushing a fraudulent 100 million XRP reward campaign.
These accounts copy Ripple’s branding to appear legitimate, even though the real Ripple YouTube channel has fewer than 82,000 followers.
Ripple responded by clarifying that scammers are hijacking existing accounts and rebranding them to look authentic. The company stressed it will never ask users to send XRP. Garlinghouse added that as XRP gains visibility, bad actors become more aggressive, and he urged caution.
This isn’t the first time such tactics have been used. Ripple sued YouTube in 2020 over similar scams, eventually settling in 2021. Despite efforts to curb fraud, Garlinghouse believes social platforms still fall short in stopping these schemes.
The latest scam follows a recent deepfake video of Garlinghouse promoting a fake event, which Ripple’s CTO quickly exposed. These incidents coincide with XRP’s price surge earlier this month — a pattern that often draws scammers back into action.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
