David Schwartz, chief executive officer at Ripple, recently fell victim to a “sophisticated” phishing scam, according to his recent social media post.
Schwartz claims the scam involved opening a support case with Apple. The fraudsters then leveraged real Apple emails and web pages in their SMS messages.
The SMS messages were sent to the Ripple executive in order to trick him into giving control over his Apple ID. They were likely able to open a support case with just his email address. “Presumably, Apple wouldn’t have given them access. What’s clever is using the (real) case to make their (fake) SMS messages convincing,” he said.
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The bad actors somehow managed to obtain Schwartz’s email address and phone number. “I’m now sure exactly how they got that, but they’re not great secrets,” he added.
However, Schwartz was not tricked by scammers because their SMS messages had “terrible grammar.”
Ripple teams up with Facebook to fight scams
The latest incident coincided with Ripple launching a new anti-scam initiative in collaboration with tech giant Meta and various cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase.
“There’s one thing all of us in tech can agree on – it’s high time we dismantled the scammers once and for all,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in his social media post.