Filipino artists hacked to promote XRP scam

Several Filipino musicians’ YouTube accounts have been hacked and are now promoting an XRP scam.

On July 15, several accounts from famous musicians based in the Philippines were seen promoting a deepfake video of Brad Garlinghouse predicting that XRP ( XRP ) might reach $4. Such schemes often direct victims to phishing websites to access their funds.

A report from local media outlet Bitpinas highlighted that YouTube pages for the local band BenBen, boyband SB19 and musician Rico Blanco were all compromised.

Filipino musicians’ YouTube accounts seen promoting XRP scam

BenBen, a nine-piece pop band with over three million followers on YouTube, announced on July 15 that their account had been compromised.

On their official Facebook page, the band said their YouTube channel was hacked, and their team was working to recover the page. While the band tried to recover the page, the account live-streamed 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 band noted that the account still streamed content by the attackers. At the time of writing, the XRP scam livestream has stopped showing.

At the same time as the BenBen hack, Filipino boyband SB19 also announced that its YouTube account with 3.6 million followers had been compromised. However, the band’s management recovered the account quickly and reported the matter to the relevant authorities.

Meanwhile, musician Rico Blanco also seemed to have been a victim of the hacks. While there are no official statements from the artist yet, Redditors flagged that the musician’s account with over 700,000 followers has been compromised.

The account is currently blocked on YouTube for violating the platform’s guidelines.

Related: Lazarus is moving millions from $305M DMM Bitcoin hack: ZachXBT

Deepfake XRP scam on YouTube

Scammers using a deepfake of Ripple CEO Brad 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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