It’s not just the unaware cryptocurrency investors that have been targeted by scammers, as blockchain payments company Ripple has been struggling with this problem for quite some time. Over the years XRP has become a popular investment amongst crypto enthusiasts, and hence, the perfect choice for scammers to dupe investors.
Over the past months, scammers have pretended to represent Ripple on several occasions. The most recent case saw a fraudulent email being sent to XRP holders promoting a fake XRP giveaway. The email was designed to replicate the company’s regular email and is pretty accurate.
Even though Ripple has taken several steps to address this issue, including a lawsuit against internet giant YouTube, where the company pointed out 305 channels impersonating the firm’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse, with some even taking over verified accounts and modifying the channel to make it look legitimate to easily promote the scam.
According to Garlinghouse, these scams have damaged his and the company’s reputation as many believe Ripple “Stole” the money. Speaking on the “Tales of Silicon Valley” podcast with Danny Fortson, Garlinghouse talked about the lawsuit against YouTube.
“We would notify them of this, and they would take weeks, months to take these things down…It’s really frustrating. I’ve got death threats from people who lost money on these YouTube scams. They think I actually stole their money.”
YouTube has failed to take any measures related to the recent rise of these scammers, even though Ripple has notified the company multiple times.
YouTube’s legal team had previously brushed off the lawsuit, citing that despite YouTube’s “unwitting verification” of channels being run by scammers, the content was created by third parties and not the platform itself, this fact remains unchanged.
The IT giant claim that since Ripple is not alleging YouTube “solicited, encouraged, or participated in the third-party fraudsters’ scam,” the platform has no liability.
And it’s not just YouTube, Garlinghouse went on to talk about an incident on Instagram where the social media company erroneously determined that a fake account that was impersonating him was a legit one.
Regulatory Uncertainty in America
Finally, he concluded that the regulatory uncertainty in the United States has also been hurting its businesses. He added that an annual financial services company had recently refused to leverage XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution because of its uncertain regulatory status.
“Yesterday, I was on a phone call with the CEO of a financial services company. He’s saying, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you guys, but we cannot use what Ripple calls On-Demand Liquidity. We’re not gonna use that until there’s clarity about how XRP is going to be regulated because we don’t wanna be on the other side of any regulatory dynamic from the U.S. government.”
