Key takeaways:
- A number of Filipino musicians are currently endorsing an XRP fraud on their YouTube accounts, which were compromised.
- According to a revelation by the local media outlet Bitpinas, the YouTube accounts of artist Rico Blanco, boyband SB19, and local band Ben&Ben were all compromised.
A number of Filipino musicians are currently endorsing an XRP fraud on their YouTube accounts, which were compromised.
On 15 July, a number of well-known Filipino singers’ accounts were observed endorsing a deepfake video purporting to show Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse forecasting that XRP may hit $4. To access their money, victims of such schemes are sometimes directed to phishing websites.
According to a revelation by the local media outlet Bitpinas, the YouTube accounts of artist Rico Blanco, boyband SB19, and local band Ben&Ben were all compromised.
On July 15, the nine-piece musical group Ben&Ben, who have over 3 million YouTube subscribers, revealed that their account had been hacked.
The band posted on their official Facebook page that their YouTube channel had been hacked and that their team was trying to get the page back. A typical XRP fraud was livestreamed by the account while the band attempted to retrieve the page.
The band declared a few hours later that they had recovered and restored a portion of their account from the hackers. The band did point out that the attackers’ content was still being streamed on the account. The XRP fraud livestream has ceased as of the time of writing.
The 3.6 million-follower YouTube account of Filipino boyband SB19 revealed that it had been hacked concurrently with the Ben&Ben attack. The band’s management, however, swiftly restored the account and informed the appropriate authorities of the situation.
In the meantime, it appeared that musician Rico Blanco was also a victim of the intrusions. Redditors noticed that the singer’s account, which has over 700,000 followers, has been hacked, even though the musician hasn’t made any formal announcements yet. Due to the account’s violations of the platform’s policies, YouTube has disabled it.
For some time now, con artists have been deploying a deepfake of Ripple‘s Garlinghouse on YouTube.
Reddit users discovered a fake video of Garlinghouse in December 2023. The video purported to show Garlinghouse requesting XRP holders to deposit their currencies to a certain location and guaranteeing to return twice as much—a tactic frequently employed by cryptocurrency scammers.
