Fraudsters and scammers are taking advantage of the recent crypto tailwind to up their attacks on the crypto community, warns Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Garlinghouse said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday that the broader market rally has spurred scammers to impersonate the official Ripple YouTube account and potentially con users. 

Losses to crypto scams hit a new record of $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025, beating the previous record set in 2022 of $2 billion and nearly equal to the total losses from all of 2024.

XRP surged to $3.66 on July 18 according to Nansen, coming close to the token’s previous 2018 high of $3.84 on Coinbase. Analysts also predict more upside, despite a 10% price retreat to $3.19 in the last 24 hours.

At the same time, Bitcoin has registered a more than 7% gain in the last 14 days, and is trading at over $119,000 per coin. EtherETH$3,656has spiked over 31% in the last 14 days, and is changing hands for $3,644 per token. 

“Like clockwork, with success and market rallies, scammers ramp up their attacks on the crypto community PLEASE BEWARE of the latest scam targeting the XRP family on YouTube and impersonating Ripple ’s official account!” said Garlinghouse.

“We will keep reporting these - please do the same. As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” he added. 

Scammers stealing accounts 

The official Ripple account on X said the bad actors are doing this by hacking YouTube accounts and updating the page to impersonate Ripple’s official account. 

“Reminder: Ripple or our execs will NEVER ask you to send us XRP,” Ripple said. 

An X user under the handle XtinaRP said one of these scams was active as of Tuesday and promised a free XRP giveaway to lure victims. It displays the video as being sponsored by Ripple.