Several Filipino musicians’ YouTube accounts have been hacked and are now promoting an XRP scam.
On July 15, numerous accounts belonging to renowned musicians in the Philippines were observed promoting a deepfake video of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse predicting that XRP might reach $4.
Such scams typically direct victims to phishing websites to steal their funds.
A report from the local media outlet Bitpinas revealed that the YouTube pages for the local band Ben&Ben, boyband SB19, and musician Rico Blanco were all compromised.
Filipino musicians’ YouTube accounts seen promoting XRP scam
Ben&Ben, a nine-piece pop band with over 3 million followers on YouTube, announced on July 15 that their account had been compromised.
On their official Facebook page, the band stated that their YouTube channel was hacked, and their team was working to recover the page.
During this period, the account livestreamed a common XRP scam.
A few hours later, the band announced that they had restored and recovered part of their account from the hijackers.
However, the account continued to stream content by the attackers. As of now, the XRP scam livestream has ceased.
Simultaneously, Filipino boyband SB19 also announced that their YouTube account with 3.6 million followers had been compromised.
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The band’s management swiftly recovered the account and reported the incident to the relevant authorities.
Meanwhile, musician Rico Blanco also appeared to be a victim of the hacks.
Although there are no official statements from the artist yet, Redditors flagged that his account, with over 700,000 followers, had been compromised.
The account is currently blocked on YouTube for violating the platform’s guidelines.
Deepfake XRP scam on YouTube
Scammers using a deepfake of Ripple’s Garlinghouse have been active on YouTube for a while now.
In December 2023, Reddit users flagged a fraudulent video of Garlinghouse asking XRP holders to send their coins to a specific address and promising to send back double the amount — a common line used by crypto fraudsters.
Redditors reported seeing the fraudulent advertisements between November and December 2023 and claimed to have already reported them to Google.
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