After the fake Garlinghouse on Instagram, the XRP community is once again targeted by an AI-driven scam wave

The XRP community can’t seem to catch a break. After a fake Brad Garlinghouse Instagram account made headlines, a new wave of AI-powered scams has now struck during the XRP Las Vegas conference. This time, fraudsters sharpened their tactics? and went straight after attendees on the ground.

AI Used to Trap Attendees in Las Vegas

An XRP Ledger validator raised the alarm on Friday morning during the conference. Profiles of women? all pictured in glamorous outfits in front of the event’s official banner? had begun sliding into attendees’ DMs. The catch? These women don’t exist at all.

Their photos were entirely AI-generated. The conference brought together some of the industry’s biggest names at the Paris Las Vegas casino, including Brad Garlinghouse and David Schwartz. Many attendees had already spent several hundred dollars on tickets, accommodation, and travel.

Those expenses are exactly the kind of signal fraudsters look for when hunting for high-value targets. The romance scam playbook? also known as pig butchering? remains as effective as ever.

The scheme starts by building trust through X or Instagram, then pivoting to an encrypted messaging app. From there, the victim is gradually nudged into sending crypto or investing in fraudulent platforms.

A Growing Threat Across the Crypto Industry

This isn’t the first time Ripple has had to sound the alarm. Back in April, David Schwartz flagged a fake Instagram account impersonating Garlinghouse to promote a bogus giveaway. Then in November, the company warned its token holders about a surge in deepfake livestreams following its Swell conference.

The XRP community has become a repeat target? precisely because it’s large, passionate, and generally open to receiving messages from new contacts. Globally, the problem has reached alarming, industrial-scale proportions. Hong Kong police recently dismantled a network that used AI-powered face-swapping technology during video calls to pose as attractive women.

The scheme netted around $46 million from victims across Asia. Back in the United States, the FBI recorded over $11.4 billion in crypto fraud losses in 2024. According to data reported by Protos, more than $900 million of that stemmed from romance scams alone.

Americans over 60 paid the steepest price, losing $7.7 billion to cybercrime in 2025, by far the hardest-hit age group.

What happened in Las Vegas is no isolated incident. It signals a troubling shift: scammers are no longer just exploiting naivety, they’re now leveraging community trust, emotional enthusiasm, and the raw power of AI. Until crypto regulation develops real tools to track and punish these schemes at scale, the next XRP conference, like every other, will remain prime hunting ground.