AI sirens go fishing at XRP Las Vegas
Romance scammers are reportedly using AI generated images of attractive women to dupe followers and attendees of this week’s XRP Las Vegas conference.
The “women,” invariably pictured in glamorous cocktail dresses in front of the event’s official banner, were flagged by an XRP Ledger validator on Friday morning.
Their job was to slide into the DMs of visitors and XRP aficionados who they hope will be predisposed to welcome otherwise unusual conversations about the crypto.
Attendees of the event, which is billed as “the Largest XRP conference in the world,” and features speakers including Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and XRP Ledger co-creator David Schwartz, will likely have spent hundreds of dollars on their tickets and even more on travel and accomodation.
This makes them potentially rich pickings for criminals, specifically “pig butcherers,” who attempt to dupe gullible investors into romantic chats that eventually turn into crypto donation or investment scams.
The conference started on Thursday and will conclude today at the Paris casino in Las Vegas.
Using XRP’s brand to steal XRP
The opening move of a pig butchering scam is almost always a fake photo.
Catfishing their victims, fraudsters build an emotional connection via broad social media platforms like X and Instagram. They’ll then usually steer the conversation to an encrypted messenger where they eventually ask for crypto donations or recommend fraudulent crypto investing platforms.
Conferences are an especially fertile ground for such scams, with attendees arriving expecting messages from new contacts, including DMs from strangers.
Read more: Pig butchering is creating entirely new industries
Hong Kong police broke up a similar operation run by a syndicate that used fake photos and AI face-swapping on video calls to impersonate attractive women.
Those workers, including many who worked against their will under threat of violence, persuaded victims in Taiwan, China, Singapore, and India to send a combined roughly $46 million worth of crypto.
This week’s non-existent bombshells at XRP Las Vegas are a miniature version of that playbook. The conference did the trust-building work that a face-swap algorithm did for the syndicate.
The FBI tallied nearly $11.4 billion in crypto-related fraud losses last year with romance scams alone accounting for more than $900 million of that figure.
Unfortunately, less technologically sophisticated Americans over the age of 60 lost $7.7 billion to internet crime in 2025, the largest share of any age cohort.
Ripple has issued repeated scam warnings to its community. Schwartz himself flagged a fake Brad Garlinghouse Instagram account in April that was promoting an XRP giveaway and last November, the company warned holders about deepfake livestreams that surged after its Swell conference.
Protos previously documented how XRP influencers promoted a fake American Express partnership that never occurred.
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