With Donald Trump busy fumbling the launch of his newest crypto offering, World Liberty Financial, phony projects have been cashing in on the frenzy.
From August 29 through late Monday evening, the only thing Trump had said about his project was its name. This left the rest to the world’s imagination and opened the door to fakes and lookalikes who duly lured in suckers and their money.
From September 3 through at least noon on September 17 — the day after Trump’s launch — a fake website ranked ninth among Google’s search engine results for the query ‘World Liberty Financial.’ The website promoted a fake governance token, WL, which has sadly traded over $3 million since inception.
A dizzying assortment of fake governance tokens exists for World Liberty Financial, which has not yet launched an official version. A brand new — and very fake — WLFI on Binance Smart Chain traded over $50 million in the 24 hours after Trump said he would issue the real WLFI sometime in the future.
A fake WLFI on Ethereum has traded over $7 million over the past three days while another fake on Solana traded almost $1 million. On Coinbase’s Base, another traded over $60,000.
Of course, transaction volumes do not necessarily equate to money lost. Wash trading and self-dealing is rampant across crypto exchanges and so many of these figures could include insiders washing money in a merry-go-round to create the fake impression of trading activity or credibility.
It is virtually impossible to know how much money the founders of these fake projects have stolen.
Even more fake World Liberty Financial scams
World Liberty Financial does have a Telegram channel, but many fake channels drew in thousands of suckers. One imposter attracted more than 70,000 by promising giveaways worth up to $15,000. Once inside the fake channel, administrators encouraged users to connect their Metamask wallet and grant permissions that permitted the draining of funds.
Hackers also overtook the X (formerly Twitter) social media accounts of Trump family members to promote fake crypto giveaways during the two weeks leading up to the launch of World Liberty Financial.
Even before Trump named his project, professional grifters were busy co-opting his surname for their own purposes. Formerly imprisoned felon Martin Shkreli claimed that he had earned the endorsement of Trump’s son Barron for a meme coin, DJT.
Sadly, the fake coin traded hundreds of millions of dollars while declining 97% from its high to date.
In short, Trump’s latest crypto project has not even launched, yet in the confusion, thousands of people have already lost money. Even staunchly pro-Trump news station Fox News was disappointed in Trump’s launch of World Liberty Financial. On Monday, it lamented its “thin” and “uneven rollout.” Wired called the event “meandering” and “short on details.”