$19M XRP Staking Scam Exposed in South Korea
South Korean authorities have cracked down on a massive $19 million XRP staking scam that promised investors fixed monthly returns of 1.5% to 1.8%. The scammers created a fake website called Fxrpntwork.com, posing as the legitimate Flare Network and its FXRP ecosystem.
The platform flooded the internet with fake promotional content across various platforms, including Naver blogs, Tistory, Wikipedia pages, online news articles, and YouTube videos. Some of these videos featured paid actors pretending to review the platform.
Police said the suspects deliberately launched the website around the real FXRP token rollout to make their operation appear legitimate. The scammers instructed victims to move their XRP through overseas exchanges before depositing it into wallets controlled by the operators.
After collecting approximately 3.4 million XRP, the operators shut down the website and disappeared. Authorities froze about $12 million in XRP and Tether across several overseas exchanges within three days of receiving an alert from an overseas cryptocurrency exchange.