Ripple Sues YouTube For Alleged Complicity In “XRP Giveaway” Scams

The CEO of the company Ripple Labs, Brad Garlinghouse, is in the crypto news again. This time, we can see that Ripple sues YouTube, the largest online video platform, for its alleged complicity in a spate of repeated “XRP giveaway” scams.

Reports show that the company (Ripple Labs) filed a lawsuit against YouTube LLC in the Northern District of California on Tuesday, April 21. The case seeks damages for YouTube and its failure to stop the XRP scammers and impersonators.

Ripple sues YouTube now and the plaintiffs are named as Ripple Labs and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, which are taking action against the video platform to “prompt an industry wide behavior change and set the expectation of accountability,” according to the official blog post shared by the company.

Moreover, Ripple and Garlinghouse say that the scam – which is often referred to as “the XRP giveaway” – has already had plenty of victims which lost “millions of XRP valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

In more detail, we can see that Ripple sues YouTube in a lawsuit that lodges complaints against the platform for: (1) Violations of the Lanham Act for Trademark Infringement; (2) Violations of California’s Statutory and Common Law Right of Publicity, and (3) Violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law.

This scam relies on spear-phishing attacks against some legit YouTube channels, according to the official filing. By using malicious emails, the attackers commandeer the YouTube channels of online creators – often the ones with legitimate ties to Ripple.

Viewers on the videos in question are urged to send “between 5,000 XRP and 1,000,000 XRP” to a listed address, which promises 5x returns from the receiver. In the lawsuit, we can see that YouTube knowingly profits from the actions of the scammers instead of stopping them.

“YouTube profits from the Scam by knowingly selling paid ads on behalf of the fraudsters who are impersonating Ripple and Mr. Garlinghouse. These ads — so-called ‘video discovery ads’ — are designed by YouTube to appear at the top of its search result page alongside organic search results,” the filing states.

Meanwhile, the latest Ripple XRP news from the market show that XRP is trading in the $0.1840 region and is still not recovering from this morning’s drop.