Ripple CTO Shares Hilarious Phishing Email Impersonating Jed McCaleb

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Ripple CTO Shares Hilarious Email from Jed McCaleb Impersonator Original Link:

Phishing Scam Targeting Ripple CTO

Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently shared a screenshot of a phishing email that was attempting to target him by impersonating Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple who left the company in 2014 to establish Stellar.

Swartz posted the fraudulent email with the caption “Seriously?!”.

The scammer pretended to be 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 showed no prior activity, likely a freshly generated wallet created solely for this scam.

Why This Scam is Absurd

McCaleb is a billionaire from selling billions of XRP over the years. The probability of him requesting $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. 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.

History of Scams Targeting Schwartz

Swartz 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, he shared a poorly spelled phishing email pretending to be from X/Twitter support, joking about needing to change his “password.”

In January, he posted a fake support email from a major platform 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 occurred.

Ripple recently launched a new holiday anti-scam campaign to help educate the community about these threats.