XRP staking scam | Blockchain News

by Arthur · January 27, 2023

The cryptocurrency community has flagged a new scam targeting XRP (XRP) investors via a fake staking scheme.

Cyber fraudsters impersonate major cryptocurrency organizations such as Ripple and Binance by building fake websites and email scammers promising to offer XRP staking services.

One of these sites has a blog post headlined “XRP staking scheduled to debut January 2023 for retail customers”, inviting users to “stake” XRP in exchange for an improbably high return on investment (ROI) ranging from 12 to 27 percent .

By claiming that a better return on investment (ROI) will be provided to only the first 10,000 accounts, the fake scam attempts to speed up the decision-making process of XRP investors.

The fake website offers an exact clone of Ripple’s website, ripple.com, by reproducing the actual website’s style and fonts and linking to some of Ripple’s previous blog articles.

The impersonators also tried to add more credibility to their posts by including information about the importance of self-storage using large hardware wallets, such as Ledger or Trezor. This was done in an attempt to make the posts seem more legitimate.

The fraudulent website has a large number of mirror domains, many of which end with “.org.th” or “.com.ve”, and it is designed to defraud users of XRP from around the world.

Scam letters claiming to be from Binance and claiming a return on investment (ROI) of up to 31% can be seen alongside the fake XRP staking website.

On January 21, a member of the industry who goes by the handle RipplePandaXRP took to Twitter to alert the XRP community to a scam. “Do not transfer XRP to an unknown address and always verify the address to determine if it is a legitimate site,” RipplePandaXRP said in a post on its website.

That said, the real Binance exchange actually includes decentralized finance (DeFi) stakes for XRP in the Binance Earn program.

On the other hand, the XRP DeFi staking scheme offered by Binance only allows users to earn up to 1.4% annually.

It is important to keep in mind that XRP does not use a proof-of-stake (PoS) method like other prominent proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, such as Ether. As a result, XRP cannot be staked (ETH).

Instead, the processing of XRP transactions relies on a network of “unique nodes” that reach a consensus on which transactions can be executed within the network.