Ripple Labs and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse are suing YouTube LLC, as a motion was filed yesterday in a San Francisco court.
Ripple, the largest holder of the digital asset XRP, claims that YouTube’s failure to crack down on XRP giveaway scams on its platform has caused “irreparable harm to their public image, brand, and reputation.” The motion describes this lack of action on YouTube’s part as deliberate and inexplicable.
YouTube’s inertia is indicative of an industry-wide problem of a lack of accountability. Victims are forced to jump through hoops to report these scams, and oftentimes that doesn’t even work – ex: when @Instagram told me I wasn’t being impersonated (3/4) https://t.co/ILhS0AcPb2
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) April 21, 2020
The crux of the complaint seems to be that YouTube are not meeting the standards which they themselves set out in their community guidelines to keep scammers and impersonators off the internet-airwaves. The motion claims that Ripple informed YouTube of scammers claiming to give away free XRP on “countless occasions,” including from legitimate YouTube channels that had been hacked and re-purposed as scam-platforms.
There is not yet any mention of potential damages to be paid, although Garlinghouse claims that reward from the lawsuit will go to reimburse scam victims.
XRP’s price seems largely unaffected by the move, and is currently trading at about $0.186.
In other Ripple news, the Ripple-backed and XRP-powered XUMM payment platform app recently launched its beta on Android and iOS.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
