Scammer Uses Impersonated Ripple CTO Handle to Parade Fake 100M XRP Airdrop

David Schwartz’s Twitter impersonator utilizes the account to publicize a fake XRP airdrop — claimed to be initiated by Ripple CEO.

In a recent outcome, a scammer who has been pretending to be David Schwartz — Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — on Twitter for years recently used the impersonated Twitter handle to publicize a fake XRP airdrop campaign.

The unidentified scammer, which aims to take advantage of unsuspecting users, claims the ponzi-like campaign with a pool of 100,000,000 XRP tokens is courtesy of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. The scam XRP airdrop was announced in a Friday tweet, together with the link to the campaign website.

Ripple has come along way in the past year and we couldn’t do it without you. XRP continues to be a key player in the Blockchain ecosystem and in 2023 we will be dedicating even more resources to make XRP and RippleNet easier to use and more accessible.
🔗 https://t.co/uIxqTjKXDv pic.twitter.com/NXP5mLSCIA

— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKasz) July 7, 2023

Fake XRP Airdrop Campaign

Dubbed “Brad Garlinghouse 100,000,000 Annual XRP Airdrop”, the recently rolled-out scam campaign is said to be for all XRP community members, including those in the United States. 

The trickster, who went as far as impersonating Ripple CEO on Medium, said the airdrop will not end until all XRP tokens in the reward pool are disbursed. “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,” part of the Medium announcement read.

Notably, the campaign is designed as a Ponzi scheme. It requires that users send any amount of XRP tokens to the designated wallet with the promise of repaying participants with 1,000% of the amount sent. 

In other words, if a user sends 100 XRP to the wallet, 1000 XRP will be returned as a reward. But first, participants must verify their address by sending between 1,000 to 300,000 XRP to the assigned campaign wallet, according to the announcement. 

This adopted strategy clarifies that the campaign may not be an authentic airdrop but rather a means to defraud naive users. But as shown on the website, 55,763,443 XRP has been reportedly disbursed at the time of writing, with 44,236,557 XRP tokens remaining in the pool.

Ripple CTO Twitter Impersonation

It bears noting that the scammer has been impersonating Ripple CTO David Schwartz on Twitter since July 2015, using the username “Joelkasz.” Surprisingly, the impersonator account has amassed over 32k followers at press time.

Notably, the real Schwartz goes with the Twitter ID “JoelKatz,” implying that updates from the former should not be relied upon. The Ripple CTO has also taken time to highlight the JoelKatz with a ‘t’ in his Twitter display name — David “Joelkatz” Schwartz — to further alert users.

While many users under the Garlinghouse-branded 100 million XRP airdrop tweet posted by the impersonating account claim to have earned from the campaign, it is only wise to research properly before indulging in such activity. More so, this event has not been endorsed on Twitter or anywhere by either of the real personalities mentioned.

However, this would not be scammers have impersonated the first time project leaders in a bid to defraud users. Early this year, The Crypto Basic reported about Ripple CTO warning users of several faked Flare support accounts. Likewise, Dogecoin co-founder Bill Markus commented on the growing rate of impersonation scams targeting Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao last September.