Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump gestures during a rally at Cambria County War Memorial Arena in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA, August 30, 2024.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
X-accounts belonging to two family members of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump were allegedly hacked on Tuesday in an effort to facilitate a scam aimed at making money from the Trump family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture.
The hack occurred as the former president prepares to release his cryptocurrency policy platform and his campaign Impact of foreign cyber attacks.
Shortly after 8:15 p.m. ET, an X account belonging to President Trump’s daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump appeared to announce the launch of a digital currency project dubbed World Liberty Financial.
The account provided Trump’s 1.7 million followers with several links to coins and a website that it claimed was the “only official channel for World Liberty Financial.”
A minute later, the X account of Donald Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany Trump, also posted a comment of support and a link to the website.
According to domain search site WhoIs.com, the website linked to the Trump family’s post was created early Tuesday morning and registered through an anonymous domain hosting platform called Njalla Okta LLC.
Based in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, Njalla Okta was created by a co-founder of dark web marketplace The Pirate Bay, making it nearly impossible for the public to trace the identity of the person behind the fake World Liberty Financial site.
Minutes after Lara Trump’s post, her husband and Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump used his own X account to write, “This is a SCAM!!” He wrote that his wife and sister’s “profiles have been compromised.”
All of the posts containing Eric Trump’s warnings have since been deleted, but were later captured in screenshots.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday about the hack reports or the status of Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures. CNBC also reached out to Eric Trump via X for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The incident marks the latest apparent failure in the Trump family’s efforts to launch a cryptocurrency platform.
Since June, multiple digital tokens have been issued that are purportedly backed by the Trump campaign or family. CNBC was unable to independently verify whether any of the tokens have direct ties to the billionaire Republican presidential candidate’s family.
One is called DJT, which has the same call letters as the ticker symbol for Trump Media Technology Group on the Nasdaq exchange. The coin has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Before the founders pull out The coin’s value plummeted in early August.
The World Liberty project appears to have already missed one scheduled announcement deadline last week.
This project is President Trump’s Keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference this summer In it, he stated his intention to create a national Bitcoin reserve if elected president.
Trump has been keen to align himself with crypto enthusiasts, making the industry the largest source of donations to both parties during this election cycle, with nearly half of all corporate funding donated during this election cycle coming from the crypto industry.
Tuesday’s incident appears to have impacted the price of Solana, another cryptocurrency token named in the purported fake post. Shortly after the post, Solana’s price fell by 9%, but has since recovered to around $126.
Lara Trump explained Solana’s accompanying governance token that supports the DeFi lending protocol, World Liberty Financial.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a parallel banking system that cuts out middlemen like banks and lawyers and replaces them with what are called smart contracts, which are pieces of code that execute automatically when certain conditions are met.
