Reports surfaced on Wednesday morning that the social media accounts of Lara and Tiffany Trump, both family members of the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, were compromised.
The incident involved the promotion of a fraudulent cryptocurrency, Solana meme coin, linked to the Trump family’s purported digital currency venture.
Lara Trump, who is married to Donald Trump’s son Eric, allegedly had her X (formerly Twitter) account used to announce the launch of a digital currency project called World Liberty Financial.
The message, posted around 8:15 p.m. ET (1:15 a.m. WAT) included links directing her 1.7 million followers to a website promoting what was claimed to be the official token of the project.
Just moments later, Tiffany Trump, the former president’s youngest daughter, also had her X account co-opted to endorse the project and share a link to the same website.
Further investigations revealed that the website linked in these posts was newly created and registered through Njalla Okta LLC, a domain hosting service based in the Caribbean.
This particular platform, with connections to the cofounder of The Pirate Bay, is notorious for its use by those seeking to mask their identities online, making it difficult to trace the origins of the scam.
Not long after these misleading posts were shared, Eric Trump took to his X account to clarify that both his wife’s and his sister’s accounts had been hacked. He warned their followers that the posts were part of a scam.
These warnings, along with the initial fraudulent posts, were subsequently deleted, though not before screenshots of the activity had been widely circulated.
The Trump campaign and Trump Organisation have yet to officially comment on the security breach or provide updates on the status of the World Liberty Financial project.
However, this incident is not the first time the Trump family has been linked to questionable digital currency ventures. Since June, several digital tokens allegedly associated with the Trump family have surfaced, although their legitimacy has not been confirmed.
One such token, named DJT, shared the same ticker as Trump Media Technology Group on the Nasdaq exchange and generated funds before its value plummeted following a sudden withdrawal by its founders in August. The World Liberty Financial project itself had reportedly missed a key announcement deadline last week, adding to concerns about its credibility.
The recent hacking also appeared to have a direct impact on the cryptocurrency market. The price of Solana, another digital currency, briefly dropped by 9% following the dissemination of the fraudulent posts.
This was attributed to the inclusion of Solana in the fake project’s promotion, with one of the misleading posts referencing a governance token linked to Solana that would supposedly support World Liberty Financial’s decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol.
DeFi, a system that eliminates traditional financial intermediaries like banks by using self-executing smart contracts, was positioned as a key feature of the purported project.
However, the quick deletion of the posts and the ongoing lack of transparency surrounding the Trump family’s involvement in cryptocurrency ventures have left many questions unanswered.
