The cryptocurrency community has alerted to a new fraud targeting XRP (XRP) investors through a fake staking scheme.

Online scammers are mimicking big cryptocurrency organizations like Ripple and Binance by building fake websites and email impostors that promise to provide staking services for XRP.

One of these websites has a blog post titled “XRP Staking is scheduled to debut in January 2023 for retail clients” inviting users to “stake” their XRP in exchange for returns of investment (ROI) that are implausibly high and varied. from 12 to 27 percent.

By claiming that a better return on investment (ROI) would be given only to the first 10,000 accounts, the fraudulent scam makes an effort to speed up the decision-making process of XRP investors.

The fake website offers an exact clone of Ripple’s website, ripple.com, by reproducing the actual style and fonts of the website and linking to some of Ripple’s previous blog articles.

The copycats also sought to add more credibility to their posts by including information about the importance of self-custody using major hardware wallets, such as Ledger or Trezor. This was done in an effort to make the posts appear more legitimate.

The fraudulent website has a large number of mirror domains, many of which end in “.org.th” or “.com.ve”, and is designed to defraud XRP users around the world.

Letters from imposters pretending to be from Binance and claiming up to 31% return on investment (ROI) can be seen accompanying the XRP staking scam website.

On January 21, an industry insider calling himself RipplePandaXRP took to Twitter to alert the XRP community to a scam. “Do not transmit your XRP to an unknown address and always check the address to determine if it is a legitimate site,” RipplePandaXRP said in a post on his website.

Having said that, the genuine Binance exchange does, in fact, list decentralized finance (DeFi) staking for XRP in its Binance Earn program.

On the other hand, the XRP DeFi staking scheme offered by Binance only allows users to earn up to 1.4% annually.

It is essential to note that XRP does not employ a proof-of-stake (PoS) method like other prominent proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies such as Ether. As a result, XRP cannot be staked (ETH).

Instead, XRP transaction processing relies on a network of “single nodes” who come to a consensus on which transactions can be executed within the network.