According to Deep Tide TechFlow on July 3, as reported by Decrypt, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that a Nigerian scammer successfully tricked a donor into giving $250,000 in cryptocurrency by impersonating Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee.
It is reported that the scammers sent an email on December 24, 2024, using a clever domain spoofing trick—replacing the lowercase letter 'i' in the official email '@t47inaugural.com' with a nearly identical lowercase letter 'l', resulting in '@t47lnaugural.com'. The victim fell for the deception and transferred 250,300 Ethereum-based USDT stablecoins to a crypto wallet controlled by the scammers on December 26.
The FBI successfully recovered 40,300 USDT through blockchain transaction tracking, with the assistance of Tether. These funds are currently undergoing a civil forfeiture process for victim compensation. Experts warn that as political acceptance of cryptocurrency increases, such scams targeting crypto donations may rise, and AI and deepfake technologies will further amplify the scale and complexity of fraudulent activities.
