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Ahmed Barakat
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Ripple co-founder and CTO David Schwartz has issued a public warning about what he called a “recent increase in airdrop and scams targeting XRPL users,” indicating that the XRP scam community has grown exponentially through AI-powered and wallet-downloading technology.
The warning, sent to his 700,000-plus followers on X, comes as XRP commands increasing institutional interest and trading volume, precisely the conditions that make its owner a valuable target. Bearish sign of Ecosystem trust.
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Ripple News: How Attacks Work, Fake Airdrops, Wallet Drainers, and AI-Cloned Executives
The process here is important to understand. The biggest problem with a fake airdrop: users targeting the fraudster advertising sites promise free XRP tokens, while connecting to an unsecured wallet triggers a malicious script, a wallet downloader, that executes one valid transaction to empty assets before the user realizes what happened.
The permission step is a trap; once signed, the transaction is immutable on chain.
Giveaways are simple yet effective. Scammers promise to refund double the amount of XRP sent to an address managed by the scammer, placing the word around Ripple announcements or major celebrations.
The supply chain has grown exponentially in 2026. Criminals are posting deep AI-generated videos on TikTok and YouTube that match Schwartz’s appearance and voice faithfully enough to fool marketers.
In another and more well-known form of attack, Schwartz announced a phishing campaign that injected fake emails into Robinhood’s domains, using Gmail dots to create accounts and embed malicious HTML payloads in device names, with messages that bypassed SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, making them look like checks.
Fake accounts impersonating Schwartz and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse have proliferated on Instagram and Telegram, with Ripple reporting over 50 such accounts across all platforms in Q1 2026 alone.
Schwartz he warned plainly: ‘Anyone who claims to be me on Instagram, Telegram, or almost anywhere else may be a fraud.’
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