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

A scammer in Nigeria is said to occur as a top Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee Official and has defeated a $ 250,000 donor in crypto by exploiting a barely noticeable typo, said American prosecutors on Wednesday.

The scammer posed as Steve Witkoff, co-chairman of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, reportedly the victim an e-mail on December 24, 2024, from “@t47lnaugural.com,” replaced the lowercase “i” in the legitieme “@t47inaugural.com” with a small letter.

Convinced that the message was legitimate, the victim spent 250,300 USDT.eth, a dollar-pegged stabile published on the Ethereum -Blockchain, on one crypto wallet controlled by the scammer on December 26, according to a rack By the office of the American lawyers for the district of Columbia.

The FBI has successfully the blockchain Transactions and reclaimed 40,300 USDT.eth of the stolen funds, which are now subject to civil forfeiture to compensate the victim.

Tether, Stablecoin issuer USDTAssisted Authorities in Freezing the Stolen Crypto, comparable to his role in a separate case last month, when the company helped facilitate the seizure of $ 225 million in USDT Coupled to large -scale “pig separation” investments, after a joint investigation by the DOJ, Secret Service and Crypto Exchange OKX.

Saravanan Pandian, CEO and founder of Crypto Exchange Koinbx, described the schedule as “a whole new minefield” where bad actors exploit political figures and real-world events to mislead victims.

He told Decrypt That “Pure Opportunism is that unnecessarily benefits from public trust, political sentiment and the irreversible nature of crypto in one go.”

The fraud has linked to the embrace of the Trump government of crypto donations, who call experts “smarter than refined”.

“While political wind is shifting in favor of Crypto, requests for crypto donations are more likely,” Chengyi told, head of the APAC policy at Chainalysis, said Decrypt. “But it is important to acknowledge that this type of scam Rail-agency is-the revenues can be transferred in Fiat-Maluta via a payment app or bank transfer to a Mule account.”

Onge warned that AI and DeepFake technology “will strengthen the scale and refinement of scam activity”, and added that effective prevention requires a “cross-sectoral approach” for law enforcement, regulators, technology companies, financial institutions and the crypto-industry.

Karan Pujara, founder of Security Analysis Firm Scam Buzzer, said that the incident exposes the fundamental security slacunes 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 it is in crypto, online shopping or banking,” Pujara said Decrypt. “If you look closely at all kinds of crypto and online scam, scam scammers often activate the human mind by activating fear, greed and Fomo instead of hacking systems.”

“With AI, speed, version and scale to replicate crypto-wang, is multiple,” he said, noted that automated bots with high-balance portfolios can check and carry out poisoned adrestransactions immediately.

Although many blame Crypto himself, Pujara pointed out that Old-School Tools, such as the suspect Left and Spoofed Domains, are still the backbone of most scam.

“In Legacy Tech such as Domein -Url’s and VoIP, where KYC is difficult, scammers have been operating these weaknesses for more than 25 years to perform data breaches, crypto -scores and even traditional financial fraud,” he said.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair