XRP staking scam
The cryptocurrency community has raised flags about a new fraud targeting XRP (XRP) investors via a phoney staking scheme.
Online fraudsters are mimicking big cryptocurrency organisations like Ripple and Binance by constructing phoney websites and email imposters promising to provide staking services for XRP.
One of these websites has a blog post with the headline "XRP staking slated to debut January 2023 for retail customers," in which users are invited to "stake" their XRP in exchange for returns on investment (ROI) that are implausibly high and range from 12 to 27 percent.
By claiming that a better return on investment (ROI) would be given to just the first 10,000 accounts, the fraudulent scam makes an effort to hasten the decision-making process of XRP investors.
The phoney website offers an accurate clone of Ripple's website, ripple.com, by reproducing the actual website's style and typefaces and connecting to some of Ripple's earlier blog articles.
The impersonators also sought to add more credibility to their postings by including information on the significance of self-custody utilising major hardware wallets, such as Ledger or Trezor. This was done in an effort to make the posts seem more legitimate.
The fraudulent website has a large number of mirror domains, many of which finish in ".org.th" or ".com.ve," and it is designed to defraud users of XRP from all over the globe.
Imposter letters purporting to be from Binance and claiming a return on investment (ROI) of up to 31% can be seen accompanying the fraudulent XRP staking website.
On January 21, a member of the industry who goes by the handle RipplePandaXRP came to Twitter to alert the XRP community of a fraud. " Do not transmit your XRP to an unknown address, and always verify the address to determine if it is a legitimate site," RipplePandaXRP said in a post on its website.
Having said that, the genuine Binance exchange does, in fact, include decentralised finance (DeFi) staking for XRP into its Binance Earn programme.
On the other hand, the XRP DeFi staking scheme that Binance offers only enables users to make up to 1.4% annually.
It is essential to keep in mind that XRP does not employ a proof-of-stake (PoS) method like other prominent proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, such as Ether. As a result, XRP cannot be staked (ETH).
Instead, the processing of XRP transactions is dependent on a network of "unique nodes" that reach a consensus over which transactions may be executed inside the network.