Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a rally at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the United States, on August 30, 2024.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
X accounts of two family members of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump“Tuesday appears to have been hacked to promote a scam designed to profit from the Trump family fortune. Emerging Cryptocurrency Businesses.
The hacks come as the former president prepares to launch his cryptocurrency policy platform and his campaign grapples with it The consequences of foreign cyber attacks.
Shortly after 8:15 p.m. ET, the X account of Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, appeared to announce a digital currency called “World Liberty Financial.” The project has been launched.
The account provided multiple links to the coins of Trump’s 1.7 million followers and a website that claimed to be “the only official channel for free finance in the world.”
A minute later, the X account of Donald Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany Trump, also posted an endorsement and website link.
The website linked to in the Trump family’s post was created early Tuesday and registered through an anonymous domain hosting platform called Njalla Okta LLC, according to domain lookup website WhoIs.com.
Njalla Okta is based in the Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis and was founded by the co-founder of the darknet market The Pirate Bay. All this makes it almost impossible for the general public to trace the identity of the person behind the fake World Free Finance website.
Minutes after Lara Trump posted, her husband, Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump, appeared to write using his own X account: “This is a scam!!” he wrote, His wife and sister’s “personal information has been leaked.”
All of those posts, including Eric Trump’s warning, have been deleted. But before taking the screenshot.
Spokespersons for Trump’s presidential campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the reported hack or the status of Trump’s cryptocurrency venture. CNBC also reached out to Eric Trump via X for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The incident is the latest apparent misstep in the Trump family’s efforts to launch an encryption platform.
Since June, a variety of digital tokens purportedly backed by Trump’s team or members of the Trump family have been launched. CNBC has not been able to independently verify that any of them are directly related to the billionaire Republican presidential candidate’s family.
One is called DJT, which has the same ticker symbol as Trump Media Technology Group on the Nasdaq exchange. This coin made hundreds of millions of dollars before the founder divested his capital In early August, causing the coin’s value to plummet.
The World Freedom Project seems to have missed a deadline Last week, plans were announced.
The project is under Trump Keynote address at annual Bitcoin conference this summer In it, he announced that if elected president, he would establish a national Bitcoin reserve.
Trump has been keen to align himself with the cryptocurrency crowd, which has proven to be the single largest industry source of donations to either party this campaign cycle. nearly half All company funds Donations this election cycle have come from the cryptocurrency industry.
Tuesday’s events appear to have affected the price of Solana, an independent cryptocurrency token mentioned in the fake post. Immediately after sending, the price of solana dropped by 9% before recovering to around $126.
Lara Trump described an accompanying governance token on Solana that will support DeFi lending protocol World Liberty Financial.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) describes a parallel banking system that eliminates middlemen such as banks and lawyers and replaces them with smart contracts, which are pieces of code that automatically execute when certain conditions are met.
