Ripple CTO Makes Critical Scam Warning About Coinbase Impersonators

David Schwartz, the chief technology officer (CTO) at Ripple, has addressed his army of X followers to warn them about a scam he has recently come across when dealing with his Coinbase account.

Ripple CTO warns the XRP army

David Schwartz, known on the X social media platform as @JoelKatz, has published a screenshot of an email from allegedly the Coinbase support team that he received. This email requires that users follow the link provided there to update their account.

It says that “some of the details in your account might need a quick review. Keeping your information current helps us provide a better and smoother experience for you.”

Schwartz warned the XRP community that this is a scam and they must not follow that link should they receive such an email: “Scam Warning: If you see an email that looks like this, it’s a scam.”

Scam Warning: If you see an email that looks like this, it’s a scam. pic.twitter.com/klneRy7dor

— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) January 11, 2025

The XRP community reacted with a wave of comments, thanking the Ripple CTO for issuing such warnings that help crypto user protect their holdings. Large XRP-themed account @BankXRP with more than 217,000 followers tweeted: “It’s really great that you do this David along with some of the other large X accounts to help protect the community.”

Schwartz warns community against XRP airdrops

As reported by U.Today earlier, roughly a week ago, the Ripple CTO joined a discussion about crypto taxation and expressed a negative view about crypto airdrops, particularly XRP ones.

He warned the crypto community against falling for crypto airdrops even if they are not scams but completely legal. In particular, he stated that those could cause significant financial issues for receivers, especially in the US and other countries where this sort of income and crypto are taxed.

While long-term capital gains are taxed when crypto increases in value and is converted into fiat, salaries received in crypto, as well as airdrops, would make a holder pay taxes when the asset is first received. Income revenue services see all those airdrops as taxable income.

XRP market performance

On Friday, the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization value staged a rise of almost 4%, rising from $2.27 to the $2.36 level.

Overnight, though, it went down a little and at the time of this writing XRP is changing hands at $2.34050 per coin.

Source