A fraudulent staking website that operated for just eight days last October allegedly drained 3.4 million XRP from 71 investors, totalling 12.3 billion won ($8.5 million), Seoul police say. Two men, both aged 29, have been referred to prosecutors on aggravated fraud charges.
What sets the case apart is what the group is alleged to have built before taking a single deposit. Police say it manufactured its own evidence base across Wikipedia, blogs, news articles and YouTube, so that investors who checked the project found what appeared to be independent corroboration. None of the four suspects has been tried, and no wrongdoing has been established in court.
A Manufactured Evidence Trail
The site, operating under the domain Fxrpntwork.com, impersonated Flare Network and its FXRP token, both legitimate blockchain projects. It promised monthly returns of 1.5% to 1.8% with principal guaranteed. Investors were allegedly directed to move XRP off domestic exchanges, route it through overseas platforms, and deposit it into wallets the group controlled. The site went dark on October 23 and the operators vanished.
Police say the group seeded false information across portal blogs, online news articles and Wikipedia entries, then produced YouTube videos featuring a paid stand-in presenter to simulate independent coverage. The operation launched the month after FXRP’s genuine token went live, borrowing the credibility of a real launch that investors could verify.
The stand-in, aged 34, has been separately charged with fraud. Police calculated average losses of 173 million won ($119,000) per victim across the week the site was active.
Scale of the Money Trail
Investigators moved quickly once alerted. An overseas exchange tipped off police last October about a surge in staking fraud activity. Authorities executed 54 search and seizure warrants and arrested one suspect at a hideout after he returned from abroad, with others picked up in sequence.
In total, investigators traced 27.3 billion won ($18.8 million) through wallets linked to the group. Of that, 17.3 billion won, roughly $12 million, was frozen across overseas exchanges. Another 10 billion won, roughly $6.9 million, moved during the investigation and remains unaccounted for. The gap between the 12.3 billion won confirmed lost by known victims and the 27.3 billion won traced suggests the total victim count may be higher than the 71 identified so far, police said.
Any recovery is also worth less than the headline loss implies. XRP traded around $1.08 on Thursday, which values the 3.4 million XRP taken at closer to $3.7 million at current prices, against the $8.5 million it was worth when it was taken last October.
A fourth suspect, also aged 29, is believed to be overseas and is subject to an Interpol Red Notice. Police have not disclosed the identities of any of the four.
Part of a Broader Enforcement Push
South Korean authorities have accelerated crypto fraud prosecutions this year. In June, police charged 23 people over laundering $11.1 million in USDT on behalf of a Cambodia-based phishing ring. Investigators stated they would treat crypto fraud with ‘zero tolerance’ and urged investors to verify projects through official sources before transferring funds.
What Investors Can Take From This
Three details in the police account are worth carrying into any staking offer. A guaranteed principal alongside a fixed monthly return is not something a genuine staking product can promise, because staking yields move with network conditions. Surface-level research is no longer a defence when the search results themselves can be manufactured, so verification has to run through a project’s own official channels rather than whatever a search engine surfaces. And an instruction to move funds off a regulated domestic exchange and through overseas venues removes the one party with both records and a legal obligation to keep them, which is usually the point at which recovery stops being possible.
