Crypto scam: Nigerian prince instead of US president
A fraudster was able to scam cryptocurrency worth 250,000 US dollars – He posed as a member of a Trump fundraising committee.
A disastrous email led recipients to believe they were donating to Trump's inauguration ceremony – but the donation ended up in Nigeria.
(Image: Sadi-Santos/Shutterstock.com)
A bizarre case of crypto fraud is currently keeping the US judiciary busy: two people transferred a large amount of the cryptocurrency Tether in the belief that they were making a donation for Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony as the 47th US president. The donation did not end up with the much-vaunted Nigerian prince, who often appears in connection with email scams. But it did end up with a supposed representative of the Trump administration. And as in the case of the aforementioned fake princes, one or more fraudsters were actually behind it.
The US Department of Justice suspects a man from Nigeria to be the mastermind. It has now applied to a US district court to confiscate the crypto assets in question that can still be found. According to a media report, one of the crypto wallets from which the funds were transferred to the fraudster apparently used to belong to one of the two heads of the crypto payment service provider MoonPay.
The court documents (case number: 1:25-cv-02116) show that the fraud took place during Christmas 2024. The perpetrator(s) did not exploit any complex security vulnerabilities in the crypto wallets concerned or anything similar, but instead used a rather simple trick: communicating via a deceptively genuine-looking email address.
An email from a fake Trump committee was enough
On December 24, 2024, one victim received an email from "one or more individuals" posing as Steve Witkoff, the co-chair of the Trump Vance inaugural committee, according to the US Department of Justice. The ending of the scammer's email address was "@t47lnaugural.com", with a capital "I" instead of the lowercase ending of the real address, which is "@t47inaugural.com", the department clarifies.
But that alone was enough to persuade Ivan and Mouna – as the actor addressed the victims in his emails – to make a transaction. On December 26, 2024, one of the victims transferred Tether cryptocurrency funds worth 250,300 US dollars to the wallet address 58c52 in the belief that it was a donation to the Trump Vance inaugural committee.
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Trail leads to Nigeria
In the 24 hours following receipt, the recipient began moving the assets to other wallets. On December 30, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked the Tether operators to freeze the remaining funds in wallet 58c52. In the period around December 31, 2024, Tether complied with this request voluntarily.
The US Department of Justice believes that a man from Nigeria is behind the fraud, but explicitly states that there could also be several perpetrators involved. The man is said to have created a network of email addresses, the false committee domain, and the crypto wallets used for the attack from October 2024. The Ministry is now asking the US District Court for the State of Columbia to confiscate the frozen crypto assets and also to compensate the victims.
Meanwhile, there is speculation that the two victims of the fraud could be the heads of the crypto payment service provider MoonPay. The account from which the transaction originated apparently used to belong to one of them: Ivan Soto-Wright. The US news portal "News For The United States" claims to have deduced this from available information about the account. His colleague in the management is called Mouna Ammari Siala, which further fuels speculation because one of the victims is also called Mouna by her first name. However, so far there is no more evidence than the wallet that presumably belonged to Soto-Wright. MoonPay has yet to comment on the case.
(nen)
