It looks like scammers are getting more and more cunning. Now they have started to impersonate top crypto media outlets to announce fake "reallocations" of crypto behemoth assets.
A historic moment for XRP?
Today, July 30, 2020, spokesperson for the XRP community and prominent crypto influencer Tiffany Hayden has unveiled that a new type of scam is gaining steam. The malefactors are using a false website on behalf of the Coindesk blockchain media outlet to announce the "reallocation" of XRP tokens.
‼️SCAM EMAIL
—Tiffany Hayden🧢 (@haydentiff) July 29, 2020
This is the most realistic looking one yet! It appears to be from @CoinDesk (it’s not) and even lists @mikejcasey as the writer! Wow.
Don’t click on the link.@Ripple is *not* reallocating $XRP.
Please RT. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/tEWrUEQth7
Fraudsters impersonate the Chief Content Officer of Coindesk, Mr. Michael J. Casey, to announce "the event of the year" for XRP holders. They claim that Ripple Inc. has launched a "new community program." Within the framework of this program, XRP tokens will be "reallocated."
The letter includes suspicious links that may redirect readers to phishing domains, so Ms. Hayden recommended that no one opens any links from the announcement.
In her estimation, this scam is very sophisticated and looks much more realistic than ordinary fake "celebration giveaways" of XRP and other top-league cryptocurrency tokens:
This is the most realistic looking one yet.
Block.one is also targeted by scammers
The members of XRP Army, the most numerous and aggressive community in the entire crypto segment, noticed that the malefactors used a domain name with the wrong domain zone code: ".net" instead of ".com." They also included homoglyphs to generate a lookalike website address.
Fraudsters are also disseminating false information about the plans of the Block.one team—the group behind the EOS.IO open-source software—to initiate reallocation of EOS token because of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pressure on the company.
Needless to say, neither Ripple Inc. nor Block.one is able to redistribute XRP, EOS or other tokens belonging to holders. Thus, the most likely fraud scenario includes the stealing of private and public keys from gullible users willing to benefit from "reallocation."
The CryptoComes team reiterates that every holder of crypto assets should be very cautious of "revolutionary" announcements made on behalf of project teams. Well-known cryptocurrency firms will never ask you for your keys, coins or sensitive personal information. In addition, they will never give away their tokens for free. Finally, no system-wide campaign by one of the crypto behemoths is launched without an announcement on their official website.