Ripple CTO David Schwartz has taken X to share a hilarious phishing email that was targeting him personally by impersonating Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple who left the company in 2014 to start Stellar.
Schwartz posted a screenshot of the fraudulent email with the caption "Seriously?!".
The scammer pretended to be Jed McCaleb, leveraging his real identity and past ties to Ripple.
The email demanded $1 million in USDT on the Ethereum blockchain. The specific Ethereum address mentioned shows no prior activity. It's likely a freshly generated wallet created solely for this scam.
Why is it absurd
McCaleb is a billionaire from selling billions of XRP over the years. Hence, the probability of him begging for $1 million is virtually zero.
As one of the original co-founders of Ripple (along with Chris Larsen and others), he received a massive allocation of XRP tokens as part of the company's early structure.
From 2014 to 2022, McCaleb methodically sold nearly all of his 9 billion XRP under this schedule. Estimates vary slightly by source and timing, but he realized around $3-3.5 billion in total proceeds from these sales.
Forbes and other reliable sources peg McCaleb's net worth at approximately $2.9 billion.
Scammers targeting Schwartz
Schwartz has been targeted by numerous crypto-related scams and phishing attempts over the years due to his high-profile role in the XRP/Ripple ecosystem.
In August, for instance, he shared a hilariously poorly spelled phishing email pretending to be from X/Twitter support, joking about needing to change his "password."
In January, he posted a fake Coinbase support email urging account updates.
In May 2024, Schwartz revealed that he had fallen for the initial stages of a sophisticated Apple ID phishing scam, but spotted it before any damage.
As reported by U.Today, Ripple recently launched a new holiday anti-scam campaign.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team