Hacked Filipino Artists Dupes into XRP Scam Promotion

A nine-piece pop group called Ben&Ben, who have over three million YouTube subscribers, began live-streaming fake XRP advertising.

Several Filipino musicians are currently endorsing an XRP fraud on their YouTube accounts, which were compromised.

On July 15, several well-known Filipino singers’ accounts were observed endorsing a deepfake video in which Brad Garlinghouse predicted that XRP$0.53 would hit $4. To access their money, victims of such schemes are sometimes directed to phishing websites.

According to a revelation by the local media outlet Bitpinas, the YouTube pages of Rico Blanco, boyband SB19, and local band Ben&Ben were all hijacked.

YouTube accounts of Filipino musicians are spotted endorsing the XRP fraud.

On July 15, the nine-piece musical group Ben&Ben, with over three million YouTube subscribers, revealed that their account had been hacked.

The band claimed on their official Facebook page that their YouTube channel had been compromised and that their team was attempting to restore the page. The account streamed a typical XRP fraud live while the band tried to retrieve the page.

The band declared a few hours later that they had recovered and restored a portion of their account from the hackers. The band pointed out that the attackers’ content was still streamed on the account. The XRP fraud livestream has ceased as of the time of writing.

The 3.6 million-follower YouTube account of Filipino boyband SB19 revealed that it had been hacked concurrently with the Ben&Ben attack. The band’s management, however, swiftly restored the account and informed the appropriate authorities of the situation.

Rico Blanco, a musician, also seems to have fallen victim to the hackers. Even though the musician has not yet released an official statement, Redditors have pointed out that the account, which has over 700,000 followers, has been hacked.

Because the account disobeyed YouTube’s policies, it is temporarily blocked on the platform.

YouTube deepfake XRP fraud

For some time now, con artists have been utilizing a deepfake of Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, on YouTube.

A fake movie purporting to show Garlinghouse requesting XRP holders to deposit their assets to a specific address and guaranteeing to return twice as much was detected by Reddit users in December 2023. This is a standard tactic employed by cryptocurrency scammers.

Between November and December 2023, Redditors claimed to have seen the bogus advertisements and already reported them to Google.