Free XRP ‘Airdrop’ Advertised On X And YouTube Actually A Scam

2 January 2024

in XRP

Reading Time: 3 mins read

circulating on X featuring an AI CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse.

Have you been seeing ads for an “airdrop” of the cryptocurrency XRP on platforms like YouTube and X over the past couple of months? They feature Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse explaining how people can receive XRP for free if they just send a particular crypto wallet some XRP first. But it’s all a scam using artificial intelligence to make it look like Garlinghouse is saying things he never actually said.

I first noticed the scam ads on YouTube back in November, which is unusual because the social media platform has a number of safeguards in place to protect against obvious scams. But recently I’ve been seeing the ad so much on X, formerly known as Twitter, that it’s seemingly taking up half of the ads in my feed.

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The ads appear to use AI to make it look like Garlinghouse is saying things he didn’t say. And it’s somewhat convincing until you really look at his mouth and notice the lip movements don’t quite match what he’s saying.

Garlinghouse himself confirmed back in November that the ads are scams.

“There’s been an uptick in deepfake scam videos (ex below) overlaying new words with old video footage from Ripple’s events (@YouTube are you asleep at the wheel again?!). Reminder: don’t trust, verify (all approved messaging will only come from official Ripple accounts),” Garlinghouse tweeted on November 16, 2023.

New technologies that allow anyone to sample someone’s voice and create a video that makes it look like they’re saying things they never said have accelerated in recent years. And plenty of people are getting scammed by the ads, as you can see from testimonials of people who said they lost money on X.

“I just got scammed 2k in xrp on an ad here on X. Saying they would double it back to me. I should have looked it up….” one user wrote on X.

X has struggled in the past with scam cryptocurrency ads, including some that even use photos of X owner Elon Musk. And it’s not clear when the company will take crypto scams seriously, since they’ve become such a big problem.

X did not immediately respond to questions emailed Tuesday about why scam ads for free Ripple seem to have skyrocketed recently. I’ll update this post if I hear back. But for now, just know that anyone who’s promising to send you cryptocurrency if you just send them some crypto first, is almost certainly operating a scam.

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I’m a technology reporter and founder of Paleofuture.com, a website I started in 2007 that looks at past visions of the future, from flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias. Paleofuture was formerly hosted at Smithsonian magazine (2011-2013) and Gizmodo (2013-2020).

My work has appeared at BBC Future, Slate, The Verge, GOOD, Pacific Standard, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed. Most recently, I was a senior writer at Gizmodo for ten years. I’ve also given talks at South by Southwest, dConstruct in Brighton, The Conference in Malmo, UCLA’s Digital Cash conference in Los Angeles, and the University of Virginia’s edUi conference. In 2012, I partnered with the BBC to put on an exhibit of retro-futuristic items from my personal collection in Hollywood, California.