Donald Trump has been no stranger to promoting the benefits of crypto products. But now a project that he has backed has been targeted by scammers, with thousands of people potentially at risk of having money stolen.
Cybercriminals have managed to place ads on the official Telegram account for World Liberty Financial (WLF) – a fairly mysterious new financial platform that has been promoted by the 45th president of the United States via his Truth Social social media network.
The fake ads offered users free cryptocurrency, with more than 70,000 estimated to be exposed to the scam.
‘The Future of Finance’
As reported by the UK’s Independent newspaper website, the scammers – under the guise of another Telegram called ‘World Liberty Financial Airdrop’ – placed an ad on the WLF channel offering up to $15,000 of cryptocurrency.
All users had to do to receive the funds, they said, was connect their crypto wallet; the problem being that this would leave exposed anything that they had in their own wallets.
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Notwithstanding the official WLF channel posting prominent warnings about potential scams and fake airdrops, the bogus ad reportedly remained in the channel for at least four days.
“Attention, everyone! We have been made aware of some ads circulating on Telegram claiming to be from us, offering fake airdrops or token sales. Please do NOT click on any ads or links that claim to be associated with World Liberty Financial. We are NOT doing any airdrops or selling any tokens at this time.” – World Liberty Financial Telegram channel
The Independent has thus far been unable to verify how many people have been financially impacted by the scam.
What is World Liberty Financial?
While details are still a little scant, WLF appears to be an impending decentralized financial platform that will be, on the face of it, managed by the Trump family.
For now it exists only in the form of the ‘Official Trump DeFi Channel’ (‘DeFi’ standing for ‘decentralized finance’) on Telegram. The channel’s handle, @defiant1s, is a hangover from WLF’s original name ‘The DeFiant Ones’.
The channel was created on August 7th, with Donald Trump using a Truth Social post to promote it last Thursday. It said: “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand—together.”
Since its inception, the channel has also posted a message from the presidential candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr, in which he rails against “how crooked banks and financial institutions rig the system against everyday Americans” and saying that WLF will make finance great again – a play on his father’s popular campaign slogan.
Telegram Troubles and Social Scams
The Telegram platform has made major news in the last couple of weeks, after its co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France on charges relating to his complicity to criminal activity through the Telegram platform.
In turn, this led to many users and critics questioning the safety of Telegram.
The WLF scam isn’t the first and is unlikely to be the last executed via a social media service. Scams on Facebook and Facebook Marketplace are commonplace, for example, while TikTok has become a hotbed for cryptocurrency scams, too.
