Last month, former president and convicted criminal Donald Trump announced that his campaign would accept cryptocurrency donations. In the following weeks, the company discovered the Netcraft cybercriminal establish According to a report shared exclusively with WIRED, dozens of scam websites are looking to target Trump supporters and trick them out of their cryptocurrency.
Netcraft discovered that in the days leading up to the announcement, scammers had registered domains with common misspellings, hoping to attract supporters intending to visit donaldjtrump.com. A domain registered to donalbjtrump.com is a near-perfect replica of the Trump campaign’s actual website. And while the Trump campaign accepted donations through Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, some scam sites instead appear to be using portals that look like Coingate, a cryptocurrency exchange. Blockchain and cryptocurrency payment processing.
“As a victim, the fact that the campaign was actually using Coinbase payments instead of direct cryptocurrency” would not be very clear, said Rob Duncan, head of research at Netcraft. “The way it was advertised was ‘Donald Trump is accepting crypto donations,’ when in reality it’s quite a bit more subtle.”
The second wave of fake websites appeared shortly after Trump’s decision May 30 felony sentencing on 34 counts of falsifying business records to pay porn star Stormy Daniels. In the hours after his conviction, the campaign raised more than 100,000 donations 34 million USD in donating. Cybercriminals appear to have anticipated this concern and are ready to take advantage of the donations pouring into Trump’s campaign after the ruling.
“Criminals like to use events like this to commit fraud based on current events, things that people are interested in, where people are more likely to click on links,” Duncan said. Following the October 7 attacks and the subsequent conflict in Palestine, Duncan said Netcraft had identified a number of donation scams, targeting people on both sides of the conflict.
“They are interested in receiving cryptocurrency from anyone. And they don’t worry about what political persuasion they can get,” Duncan said.
Duncan added that through examining the blockchain, it appears that no scams have been successful yet, but he suspects that may be because they are relatively new and may not yet be active.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Cryptocurrency is possible especially helpful for criminals 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 Report, cryptocurrency investment scams cost people about $3.94 billion. “Cryptocurrency is clearly a very good mechanism for criminals to use,” Duncan said. “There is no way to reverse the payments; Once the money is in the criminal’s wallet, it is gone.”
Trump’s recent support for cryptocurrency is a significant shift in his presidency. In 2019, Trump said he was “not a fan” about cryptocurrency in a series of posts on X, then Twitter. “We only have one real currency in the United States… It’s called the US Dollar!” he posted at the time.
