Garlinghouse, XRP giveaway, and PwC – The latest on the scam that had it all

Crypto-scams seem to have penetrated the industry to promote a few individual cryptos. Likewise, high-profile social media accounts have also fallen victim to unethical activities by hackers to promote crypto-scams. This could include both Bitcoin, as well as altcoins to achieve their agenda.

The present episode, in many ways, is no different either.

Spare no one… right?

One of the largest firms within the audit and assurance sector, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC)’s Venezuelan branch, is the latest to fall victim to the same. This time – An XRP-related scam.

The verified Twitter account, in order to promote the blatantly obvious XRP scam, recently tweeted,

#xrp go go go……….. https://t.co/rcG6ZP8ak1

— PwC Venezuela (@PwC_Venezuela) September 4, 2022

In order to promote the alleged scam, the blog added,

“To celebrate the global power of #XRP we are proud to announce initiating the annual airdrop pool of 100 000 000 XRP to every Ripple user. Nothing we do at Ripple Labs would be possible without our community, and this is just a part of our efforts to assert that.”

In fact to further inject some certainty, hackers associated this big event with the presence of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Now, there is one important Q to be asked here. Did the aforementioned in any way have any impact on XRP’s performance on the charts?

Surprisingly, yes. XRP, at the time of writing, was up by 3% as it traded above $0.33 on the charts. As a matter of fact, XRP’s trading volume saw a much-needed uptick, one that helped stabilise its falling curve.

Source: Santiment

At press time, XRP’s trading volume was around the 350M-mark, with the same still appreciating on the charts. What this underlined was that traders/investors, irrespective of the size, jumped back into this pool.

In addition to this, cryptocurrency watchdog WhaleAlert reported that there had been some large XRP transactions of late. Just less than 24 hours ago, three XRP whale transfers happened in quick succession. They all amounted to 144.3 million XRP tokens worth $48 million.

Needless to say, it’s difficult to conclusively link the aforementioned with the uptick in XRP’s value. Even so, that’s an intelligent guess to be made.

Is it the first time? 

Well, that’s far from being a reality.

Here’s one NFT version – A hacker compromised the social media accounts of the British Army in July to push people towards cryptocurrency scams. During the episode, the Army’s Twitter and YouTube profiles were taken over by the hacker.

The Twitter account’s name was changed to “pssssd” and its profile and banner pictures were changed to resemble a non-fungible token (NFT) collection called “The Possessed.”

On the altcoin front, the DOGE community too witnessed something similar to promote a giveaway scam. In fact, the official Dogecoin handle was soon posting warnings about a scam making rounds on the social media platform. Back then too, DOGE recorded a price hike on the charts, with the question again arising – At what cost?