XRP price plummets as misinformation spreads, Ripple co-founder Larsen’s personal account falls victim to unauthorized access

9 months ago 93

Affects the price of XRP

On January 31, Chris Larsen, co-founder of Ripple Inc., reported that several of his crypto asset (virtual currency) XRP accounts had been compromised.

As Larsen emphasized, this is a personal account, but information that Ripple’s account may have been hacked was first spread, which affected the price of XRP. According to TradingView data, the stock fell by more than 2% before and after the false information, but some overseas media have reported that the stock fell by more than 4% or 5% at one point.

ZachXBT, a blockchain analyst, is said to have first reported that Ripple may have been hacked. In the post below, he states that “210 million XRP (equivalent to $110 million) may have been leaked,” and explains that “the stolen assets were transferred to Binance, Kraken, OKX, etc.”

It appears @Ripple was hacked for ~213M XRP ($112.5M)

Source address
rJNLz3A1qPKfWCtJLPhmMZAfBkutC2Qojm

So far the stolen funds have been laundered through MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, HitBTC, etc pic.twitter.com/HKGYsLQeMv

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 31, 2024

Approximately 30 minutes after posting this, Mr. Larsen confirmed that it was his account, not Ripple’s, that was compromised.report. He explained that he immediately recognized the problem, informed the exchanges, asked them to freeze the assets, and also contacted law enforcement.

And in a subsequent post he says:

Ripple’s wallet is safe and has not been compromised. We have confirmed that almost all affected assets were converted from XRP to other currencies.

We are already cooperating with law enforcement. It has been reported that many assets have been frozen and the remaining assets are being actively pursued.

Unauthorized access case

There are no end to cases of unauthorized access to virtual currencies exchanged over the Internet.

As a recent example, on the 23rd of last month, the blockchain game project “Gamee” announced that the contract for its proprietary token GMEE had been accessed illegally and 600 million tokens had been stolen.

Gamee was founded in 2015 and is currently owned by Animoka Brands, a leading NFT (non-fungible token) gaming company.

connection: Unauthorized access to “Gamee” contract under Animoka Brands, leaked worth 2.2 billion yen