In brief
- A DOJ crypto scam case briefly sealed in full has sparked a backlash after NOTUS linked the victims to MoonPay execs tied to Donald Trump’s meme coin.
- Interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro blamed court clerks for sealing the entire docket and said prosecutors only asked to shield a company name.
- The alleged victims sent $250K to a scammer posing as a Trump ally last December.
A federal crypto fraud case docket with reported links to Donald Trump’s crypto circle and MoonPay executives was briefly sealed in its entirety, with regional interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro pinning the blame squarely on court clerks.
“The court made a ministerial, clerical error that as soon as we realized it, within hours, the whole docket was unsealed,” Pirro told media outlet NOTUS in an interview Tuesday. “They admitted we never asked for the docket to be sealed.”
The dispute erupted after a crypto fraud case surfaced involving a Nigerian scammer who allegedly duped victims out of $250,000 by impersonating Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee.
The case has drawn scrutiny because the victims appear to be executives from MoonPay, a crypto platform with ties to Trump’s business ventures, as first reported by NOTUS.
MoonPay lets users buy digital assets with traditional payment methods, and it served as the official on-ramp for purchasing President Trump’s Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin.
“We saw a 1,023% increase in first-time onchain transactions,” the company tweeted in January, during the meme coin’s launch week.
The scammer contacted the victims on Christmas Eve using a barely noticeable typo, replacing the lowercase “i” in “@t47inaugural.com” with a lowercase “l” to create “@t47lnaugural.com,” tricking victims into transferring 250,300 USDT.ETH on December 26, 2024.
The filing only listed two apparent victims named “Ivan” and “Mouna” in partially redacted emails, the same first names as MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright and CFO Mouna Ammari Siala, with the crypto wallet address linked to Soto-Wright.
Pirro said prosecutors asked to seal only the original complaint and make an amended version public to shield the identity of a “company” involved.
“We filed an amended complaint, the purpose of which was to remove the name of one of the companies,” Pirro said. “This is the type of case where victims — including individuals, employees of a company, as well as a victim company — have a right to not have their names included in a complaint.”
“It’s like they panicked”
The temporary sealing of the entire docket struck former prosecutors as highly unusual.
“I think what they’re trying to say is, ‘We made a mistake and we don’t want anybody knowing about the mistake,'” one anonymous former assistant U.S. attorney who recently departed the office, told NOTUS. “It’s like they panicked.”
The FBI has since traced the blockchain transactions and recovered 40,300 USDT.ETH of the stolen funds, with stablecoin issuer Tether assisting the authorities in freezing the stolen crypto.
“If you’re friendly with Trump and you’re a Trump crypto bro, you get the DOJ proactively trying to recover your assets,” said Mark Hays, a crypto regulation advocate with Americans for Financial Reform.
MoonPay and the DOJ have not yet responded to requests for comment from Decrypt.
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