It looks like an interesting trend has emerged in the lucrative segment of XRP scam airdrops. Their organizers have moved the promotion of fraudulent giveaways from Telegram and YouTube to much more exotic platforms.
You as well, Archive?
Internet Archive is a leading non-profit digital library that hosts numerous scientific and fictional articles, thousands of videos and audio files. It also delivers the services of Wayback Machine, "the cache of the internet," that displays the content of indexed web pages (485 bln files!) that have been deleted.
In a nutshell, Internet Archive is a very useful and reliable instrument for scholars, enthusiasts, writers and content creators. Internet Archive is ranked #1 by the Similarweb intelligence portal in the "Science and Education" category, with 65.7 mln visitors registered in July 2020.
Now, this platform is being targeted by omnipresent XRP scammers. The malefactors invite all gullible XRP holders to participate in an "annual airdrop." Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is allegedly "giving back" to the community—again—and all interested persons should send their XRP to the scammers' addresses.
The scammers added backlinks with the "archive.org" domain name to their tweets with bots that aggressively promote the scam on Twitter. Once the user clicks on this link, he/she is immediately redirected to the XRP scam airdrop Medium post.
Lucrative business in XRP scamming
Recently, researchers of XRP Ledger transactions attempted to calculate the profitability of one scam airdrop. According to the estimations of the XRPLorer Forensics team, the fraudsters may earn $60,000 in a single day.
Trying to shuffle funds collected from gullible "investors," fraudsters utilize Binance cryptocurrencies exchange ecosystem and barely known trading platforms. This scamming method has not changed for years.
Recently however, XRP scammers invented a new fraud mechanism. They impersonated the administration of Coindesk crypto media outlet and informed all of its newsletter subscribers of the "re-allocation" of XRP initiated by Ripple.
As covered by CryptoComes previously, the same team of fraudsters impersonated Block.one while promoting "re-allocation" of EOS tokens.
