Online fraudsters are impersonating major crypto currency firms by creating fake websites and email imposters pretending to provide staking services for XRP

The crypto currency community has raised flags regarding a new scam targeting XRP investors through a fake staking program.

Online fraudsters are impersonating big crypto currency firms such as Ripple and Binance by creating fake websites and email imposters pretending to provide staking services for XRP.

One such website involves a blog post titled ‘XRP staking set to debut January 2023 for retail users,’ inviting users to ‘stake’ their XRP with unrealistic returns on investment (ROI), ranging from 12 per cent to 27 per cent. The fake scheme attempts to rush XRP investors’ decision by mentioning that only the first 10,000 accounts will receive a higher return on investment.

The fake website provides a well-crafted clone of Ripple’s website by copying the original layout and fonts and linking some of its previous blog posts. The impersonators also tried to add more authenticity to their posts by adding information about the importance of self-custody using major hardware wallets, such as Ledger or Trezor.

The scam website has a lot of mirror domains ending with ‘.org.th’ or ‘.com.ve’, targeting XRP users from across the world.

The XRP staking website scam is accompanied by imposter emails impersonating Binance, offering up to 31 per cent return on investment on XRP staking. On Jan. 21, industry enthusiast RipplePandaXRP took to Twitter to warn the XRP community about the scam.

Don’t send your XRP to any unknown address and always check the address to see whether it is a legitimate site, wrote RipplePandaXRP.

That said, the real Binance exchange actually offers DeFi staking for XRP as part of its Binance Earn program. However, Binance’s XRP DeFi staking program only allows users to earn up to 1.4 per cent annually.

It’s important to note that XRP cannot be staked as it does not run with a proof-of-stake (PoS) system such as large PoS crypto currencies like Ether. Instead, XRP transactions rely on ‘unique nodes’ that agree on which transactions can be processed in the network.