The founder of the “community-driven” XRP data aggregator XRPlorer has revealed on social media XRP giveaway scams on YouTube may have cost Coinbase users over 940,000 XRP tokens, worth over $20,000 at press time.
According to Thomas Silkjær, Coinbase users have been sending funds to fake cryptocurrency giveaways on YouTube and lost hundreds of thousands worth of cryptocurrency by participating in these fake giveaways.
On social media, Thomas Silkjær urged Coinbase to start warning users when they withdraw funds, as they could be moving them to fraudulent accounts believing they are merely participating in a giveaway from Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, or another celebrity.
As CryptoGlobe reported earlier this year, hackers hijack popular YouTubers’ accounts to run cryptocurrency scams. They use old livestreams from influential figures in the cryptocurrency space and add a fake giveaway to them to trick users into believing it’s legitimate.
According to data shared by XRPlorer, affected users aren’t just on Coinbase. The data aggregator revealed users from Binance, Kraken, Crypto.com, and LiteBit have been sending funds to XRP giveaway scams.
Ripple and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse have sued YouTube over the Google-owned platform’s failure to stop these XRP giveaway scams. In their lawsuit, Ripple and Garlinghouse claimed the firm’s failure to crack down on these scams caused “ irreparable harm to their public image, brand, and reputation.”
The crux of the complaint seems to be that YouTube are not meeting the standards which they themselves set out in their community guidelines to keep scammers and impersonators off the internet-airwaves. It claims Ripple informed YouTube of the scammers on “countless occasions.”
YouTube itself has responded to the lawsuit, denying liability by claiming scams and impersonation channels represent content created by third parties, regardless of its “unwitting verification.”
Featured image via Pixabay.