Crypto forensic experts at Xrplorer warn that an elaborate phishing scam is trying to steal the secret keys of XRP users by telling potential victims that Ripple is giving away tokens.
The fraudsters would have sent extremely small amounts of XRP to various addresses on the XRP registry with a memo that reads,
“As of February 1, 2020, Ripple launches XRP 3 billion to entice network users. Get 25% more XRP added to your account balance in minutes. "
The goal is to direct unsuspecting users to click on what appears to be the Ripple's Insights blog offering a great promotional gift.
To the untrained eye, fake websites seem legitimate, but scammers actually use good replicas of websites familiar to XRP investors in order to lure victims into the surrender of their account information and secret keys.
Deactivation sites use homoglyphic domains which exchange characters from official domains with similar characters from different scripts to deceive users. For example, like a Greek Ο, a Latin O and a Cyrillic О look alike but have different codes, they could be used to generate a spoofed web domain.
“The whole robbery operation is an elaborate configuration with messages sent to XRP accounts according to their assets, homoglyphic domains, false but reliable marketing material, tools to collect secret keys which also verify the balance on the XRPL and much more. ”
Fraudsters now also send emails to people who may be interested in cryptography. As of June 15, they had stolen 2,100,000 XRP . Xrplorer said they have also cleared 1,980,000 XRP mainly via cryptographic exchanges ChangeNOW and CoinSwitch.
