Scammers Impersonate Trump Inaugural Committee to Steal Crypto

Federal prosecutors say scammers posed as the presidential inaugural committee to steal thousands in cryptocurrency.

In a civil complaint filed last week — and reported on Friday (July 4) by CNBC, the U.S. attorney says the scammers used phony email addresses designed to look like they belonged to the inaugural committee to “trick or coerce victims into providing them money.”

It was just the difference of one letter, creating email addresses ending in ”@t47lnaugural.com” with a lowercase “l,” rather than ”@t47inaugural.com” with a lowercase “i.” This trick allowed the scammers to convince their victims to send them more than 250,300 in USDT stablecoin, which amounts to around $250,300.

Those emails, sent in December, purported to be from Steve Witkoff, then co-chair of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee.

“The victim believed they were contributing a donation to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee through a false email address,” the court document said.

The government aims to seize nearly 40,400 USDT “to punish and deter criminal activity by depriving criminals of property used in or acquired through illegal activities” and “to recover assets that may be used to compensate victims,” the filing added.

The news comes soon after the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global organization targeting money laundering, terrorist and proliferation financing, warned that the  growing adoption of stablecoins and other virtual assets (VAs) “could amplify illicit finance risks.”

The use of stablecoins by North Korean agents, terrorist financiers, drug traffickers and other illicit actors has grown over the past year, and “most on-chain illicit activity now involves stablecoins,” FATF said in news release following its latest report on the global implementation of anti-money laundering and counterterrorist financing (AML/CFT) focused on VAs and virtual asset service providers (VASPs).

“Mass adoption of stablecoins or VAs more broadly could amplify illicit finance risks, particularly with uneven application of the FATF Standards for VAs/VASPs,” the release said.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote recently about the increasing mainstream embrace of stablecoins in the wake of new legislation. Now that compliance pathways have become clearer, traditional financial players have begun piloting and launching blockchain initiatives.

“Everybody’s jumping into stablecoins right now,” Brett McLain, head of payments and blockchain at Kraken, said in an interview with PYMNTS. “All the big banks, they’re talking about creating their own; others want to leverage existing ones.”