Last month, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump announced that his campaign would accept donations in cryptocurrencies. In the weeks that followed, cybercrime detection firm Netcraft found Dozens of scam websites are trying to target Trump supporters and swindle them out of their crypto, according to a report shared exclusively with WIRED.
Netcraft found that in the days leading up to the announcement, scammers registered domains with common misspellings to lure supporters looking to access donaldjtrump.com. One domain registered at donalbjtrump.com was a nearly perfect replica of the actual Trump campaign website. And while the Trump campaign accepts donations through Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, some scam websites instead appear to use a portal that looks like Coingate, a blockchain and crypto payment processor.
“To the victim, the fact that the actual campaign is using Coinbase payments rather than direct cryptocurrency may not be very obvious,” says Rob Duncan, head of research at Netcraft. “The way it’s advertised is ‘Donald Trump is taking cryptocurrency donations,’ when in reality it’s a little more subtle.”
A second wave of fake websites appeared soon after Trump’s tweet. Felony conviction on May 30 Porn star Stormy Daniels pleaded guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to pay him money. Within hours of her conviction, the campaign had raised over $100,000. $34 million in donations. Cybercriminals had anticipated this interest, and they were prepared to profit from the donations that poured into the Trump campaign in the wake of the verdict.
“Criminals like to use these kinds of events to base their scams on current events, things that people are interested in, where people are more likely to click on the link,” Duncan says. Duncan says that in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the subsequent conflict in Palestine, Netcraft identified a number of charity scams targeting people on both sides of the conflict.
“They are interested in getting cryptocurrency from anybody,” says Duncan. “And they don’t care what political ideology they are affiliated with.”
Duncan said that when examining the blockchain, it appears that none of these scams have been successful yet, but he suspects that may be because they are relatively new and have not yet become active.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Cryptocurrencies can be Particularly useful For criminals, this is because they are largely unregulated and do not have the same restrictions as traditional financial institutions. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation 2023 Internet Crime ReportPeople have lost about $3.94 billion to crypto investment scams. “Crypto is clearly a very good mechanism for criminals to use,” Duncan says. “There’s no way to revert the payment; once the money goes into the criminal’s wallet, it’s gone.”
Trump’s recent support of crypto is a change from his presidency. In 2019, Trump said he “not a fan” X and then several posts on Twitter about cryptocurrency. At the time, he wrote, “In the US we only have one real currency… it’s called the United States Dollar!”
