Scammer Posed as Trump-Vance Official to Steal $250K in Crypto, DOJ Says

A scammer located in Nigeria allegedly impersonated a top Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee official and conned a donor out of $250,000 in crypto by exploiting a barely noticeable typo, U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday.

Posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, the scammer reportedly sent the victim an email on December 24, 2024, from “@t47lnaugural.com,” replacing the lowercase “i” in the legitimate “@t47inaugural.com” with a lowercase “l” that appeared nearly identical depending on the font used.

Convinced the message was legitimate, the victim transferred 250,300 USDT.ETH, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued on the Ethereum blockchain, to a crypto wallet controlled by the scammer on December 26, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

The FBI successfully traced the blockchain transactions and recovered 40,300 USDT.ETH of the stolen funds, which are now subject to civil forfeiture proceedings to compensate the victim.

Tether, the issuer of stablecoin USDT, assisted authorities in freezing the stolen crypto, similar to its role in a separate case last month, when the company helped facilitate the seizure of $225 million in USDT linked to large-scale “pig butchering” investment scams, following a joint investigation by the DOJ, Secret Service, and crypto exchange OKX.

Saravanan Pandian, CEO and Founder of crypto exchange KoinBX, described the scheme as “a whole new minefield” where bad actors exploit political figures and real-world events to deceive victims.

He told Decrypt that “it’s purely opportunism that takes undue advantage of public trust, political sentiment, and the irreversible nature of crypto all at once.”

The fraud capitalized on the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto donations, which experts call “more clever than sophisticated.”

“As political winds shift in favour of crypto, requests for crypto donations become more plausible,” Chengyi Ong, Head of APAC Policy at Chainalysis, told Decrypt. “But it’s important to recognize that this sort of scam is rail-agnostic—the proceeds could equally have been transferred in fiat currency through a payment app or bank transfer to a mule account.”

Ong warned that AI and deepfake technology will “amplify the scale and sophistication of scam activity,” adding that effective prevention will require a “cross-sectoral approach” across law enforcement, regulators, tech companies, financial institutions, and the crypto industry.

Karan Pujara, founder of security analysis firm Scam Buzzer, said the incident exposes fundamental security gaps among crypto donors. 

“Since the early days of the internet, phishing has remained the oldest trick in the book, and users are still falling for it, whether in crypto, online shopping, or banking,” Pujara told Decrypt. “If you look closely at all sorts of crypto and online scams, scammers often trick human minds by triggering fear, greed, and FOMO rather than hacking systems.”

“With AI, speed, execution, and scale to replicate crypto scams is multifold,” he said, noting that automated bots can monitor high-balance wallets and execute poisoned address transactions instantly.

While many blame crypto itself, Pujara pointed out that old-school tools, such as suspicious links and spoofed domains, are still the backbone of most scams. 

“In legacy tech like domain URLs and VOIP, where KYC is tough, scammers have been exploiting these weaknesses for over 25 years to execute data breaches, crypto scams, and even traditional finance fraud,” he said.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair