David Schwartz, the Chief Executive Officer at Ripple, recently revealed that he was the target of a "sophisticated" phishing scam. In a detailed social media post, Schwartz explained that the scam involved the perpetrators opening a support case with Apple and using legitimate Apple emails and web pages to send convincing SMS messages.

The fraudsters sent these SMS messages to Schwartz, attempting to deceive him into relinquishing control over his Apple ID. They likely initiated the support case using only his email address, leveraging the real case to lend credibility to their fake messages. "Presumably, Apple wouldn't have given them access. What's clever is using the (real) case to make their (fake) SMS messages convincing," Schwartz remarked.

Despite the attackers managing to obtain Schwartz's email address and phone number, he was not deceived by their scheme due to the poor grammar in their SMS messages. "I'm not sure exactly how they got that, but they're not great secrets," he added, indicating that while his contact information is relatively accessible, the scam's execution failed to fool him.

This phishing attempt coincides with Ripple's recent launch of a new anti-scam initiative in partnership with tech giant Meta and several cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse highlighted the urgency of combating online fraud in his social media announcement. "There’s one thing all of us in tech can agree on – it’s high time we dismantled the scammers once and for all," Garlinghouse asserted.

The initiative aims to bolster security measures and foster collaboration across the tech and cryptocurrency sectors to effectively address and mitigate the threat of scams. As cybersecurity threats become increasingly sophisticated, efforts like this underscore the importance of vigilance and proactive measures in protecting users and their data.