Ripple CTO Exposes Brad Garlinghouse Deepfake Scam, Warns XRP Holders

• A circulating XRP airdrop video that claims to celebrate the recent conclusion of the SEC’s legal battle has been flagged by Rippe CTO as fake.
• Ripple has clarified that any video asking users to send money to receive a double back is a scam. 

Ripple Chief Technology Officer (CTO), David Schwartz, has cautioned the community against a rising trend of scammers impersonating big personalities in the crypto space. According to him, Ripple boss Brad Garlinghouse has become one of these personalities.

In a recent post by Schwartz, Garlinghouse addressed the community on the historic conclusion of the legal battle between Ripple Labs and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

In the video, he announced the launch of a Ripple reward program that seeks to airdrop 1 million XRP to the community. A URL was therefore featured in the video to provide instructions to interested users. However, this turned out to be another scam. Schwartz hinted that an original video from media interviews was taken by these scammers and overlaid with scam content.

Fascinatingly, this is not the first time scammers have impersonated Ripple officials. On July 23, 2025, Garlinghouse cautioned the community against the latest scam targeting the XRP community. According to the Ripple boss, whenever the information sounds too good to be true, they should know it is probably a scam.

Prior to that, multiple reports had raised an alarm about the rising crypto scam, with hackers disclosed to have stolen $3.01 billion from the crypto space in 2024, as highlighted in our previous news brief. The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) has also disclosed that crypto scams linked to social media have become a major threat to investors this year, as discussed earlier.

Ripple Cautions the XRP Community

To address some of these issues, Ripple’s official X post earlier listed all the official accounts of the company to keep users informed. Before then, reports suggested that scammers unauthorizedly take over people’s accounts and update the information to appear as the official account of the Ripple company.

In January, scammers were spotted pushing a US Treasury XRP scam campaign to target social media users, as noted in our earlier post. On July 28, Schwartz also called out another YouTube video impersonating Garlinghouse to announce an XRP giveaway. The video asked users to send 500 XRP and receive a double back. According to Schwartz, that was an AI-generated fake. Ripple also cautioned that it will never ask anyone to send XRP to receive a double back.

To show how it takes these impersonations seriously, Ripple sued YouTube in 2020 for failing to protect consumers from these fake giveaways.

In 2021, Ripple dropped the lawsuit after settling with YouTube. Interestingly, the blockchain company has not been the only target of these schemes. Celebrities became a main target in 2021, with reports suggesting that more than $100 million was stolen from them.

In February 2025, CNF reported that hackers had exploited a Saudi Law conference’s X account to fake a royal endorsement deal. As mentioned in our previous news brief, the SEC has now formed a Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit (CETU) to protect retail investors from such attacks.