The Supreme Court of India’s YouTube page was today taken over by hackers to promote a fraudulent scheme relating to the XRP cryptocurrency and its maker, San Francisco-based fintech Ripple. The hack marks the first such incident for the judicial body.
Hackers Compromise India Supreme Court’s YouTube To Stream XRP Scam
On Sept. 20, the official YouTube channel of the Supreme Court of India, with more than 218,000 subscribers, was rebranded to “Ripple.live24”.
The malicious hackers then deleted all previous videos and livestreamed a new video entitled “Brad Garlinghouse: Ripple Responds To The SEC’s $2 Billion Fine! XRP PRICE PREDICTION”, which was a deepfake of the company’s CEO aiming to lure unsuspecting investors to invest in the scam, promising too-good-to-be-true returns.
“This is to inform all concerned that the YouTube channel of the Supreme Court of India has been taken down. The services on the YouTube channel of the Supreme Court of India will be resumed shortly,” the apex court said in an official statement.
Notably, YouTube took down the channel shortly afterward, citing, “This channel was removed because it violated our Community Guidelines.“
Ripple & XRP See Uptick In Deepfake Scams On YouTube
This incident is not isolated; similar Ripple/XRP-related scams have pervaded the crypto space. In particular, XRP scams have been plaguing YouTube for years. In most cases, phishing links often accompany the phony XRP livestreams, which, when clicked, advise potential victims to link their cryptocurrency wallets. Once this is done, bad actors can easily access the users’ wallets and withdraw crypto.
Notably, Ripple has issued several warnings, cautioning users against falling for such sham phishing links as well as deepfake videos. Back in April 2020, Garlinghouse sued YouTube for allowing such scams to proliferate on its platform. Ultimately, the two reached a settlement in 2021 and agreed to collaborate on thwarting such deceitful practices in the future.
However, with the advancement of AI-powered voice-cloning technologies, XRP-related scams continue to increase on the popular video-hosting platform.