- Why is it absurd
- Scammers focusing on Schwartz
Ripple CTO David Schwartz has taken X to share a hilarious phishing e-mail that was focusing on him personally by impersonating Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple who left the corporate in 2014 to begin Stellar.
Schwartz posted a screenshot of the fraudulent e-mail with the caption “Severely?!”.
The scammer pretended to be Jed McCaleb, leveraging his actual identification and previous ties to Ripple.
The e-mail demanded $1 million in USDT on the Ethereum blockchain. The particular Ethereum tackle talked about reveals no prior exercise. It is seemingly a freshly generated pockets created solely for this rip-off.
Why is it absurd
McCaleb is a billionaire from promoting billions of XRP through the years. Therefore, the chance of him begging for $1 million is nearly zero.
As one of many authentic co-founders of Ripple (together with Chris Larsen and others), he obtained a large allocation of XRP tokens as a part of the corporate’s early construction.
From 2014 to 2022, McCaleb methodically offered almost all of his 9 billion XRP underneath this schedule. Estimates differ barely by supply and timing, however he realized round $3-3.5 billion in complete proceeds from these gross sales.
Forbes and different dependable sources peg McCaleb’s internet value at roughly $2.9 billion.
Scammers focusing on Schwartz
Schwartz has been focused by quite a few crypto-related scams and phishing makes an attempt through the years as a consequence of his high-profile function within the XRP/Ripple ecosystem.
In August, as an illustration, he shared a hilariously poorly spelled phishing e-mail pretending to be from X/Twitter assist, joking about needing to vary his “password.”
In January, he posted a pretend Coinbase assist e-mail urging account updates.
In Might 2024, Schwartz revealed that he had fallen for the preliminary phases of a classy Apple ID phishing rip-off, however noticed it earlier than any harm.
As reported by U.Right this moment, Ripple just lately launched a brand new vacation anti-scam marketing campaign.

