The cryptocurrency community has flagged a new scam via fake staking schemes targeting XRP (XRP) investors.
Online scammers mimic big cryptocurrency organizations such as Ripple and Binance by creating fake websites and fraudulent emails that promise to offer XRP staking services.
One of these websites has a blog post with the headline, “XRP Staking Planned to Launch for Retail Customers in January 2023,” which provides users with an incredibly high and wide range of return on investment (ROI). You are invited to “stake” XRP in exchange for 12 to 27 percent.
By claiming increased return on investment (ROI) for only the first 10,000 accounts, the fraudulent scam attempts to speed up the decision-making process for XRP investors.
The fake website offers an exact clone of Ripple’s website, ripple.com, by recreating the style and typeface of the real website and connecting to some of Ripple’s previous blog posts. .
Impostors also sought to build credibility in their posts by including information about the importance of self-management with major hardware wallets such as Ledger and Trezor. This was done to make the post look more legitimate.
This scam site has a number of mirror domains, many of which end in ‘.org.th’ or ‘.com.ve’, designed to trick XRP users around the world.
Fake letters claiming to be from Binance and claiming return on investment (ROI) of up to 31% can be seen attached to fraudulent XRP staking websites.
On January 21st, an industry insider named RipplePandaXRP took to Twitter to warn the XRP community of the fraudulent activity. “Don’t send her XRP to unknown addresses. Always check the address to determine if it’s a legitimate site,” he said in a post on RipplePandaXRP’s website.
That said, the real Binance exchange actually includes decentralized finance (DeFi) staking XRP into 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 essential to note that XRP does not employ a Proof of Stake (PoS) scheme like other prominent Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies such as Ether. As such, it is not possible to stake XRP (ETH).
Instead, the processing of XRP transactions relies on a network of “unique nodes” that reach consensus about transactions that run within the network.
