Back in September, Donald Trump announced his new crypto exchange, World Liberty Financial (WLFI). Now, registered investors can officially sign up for the whitelist—assuming they can avoid the scammers.
On X (formerly Twitter), World Liberty Financial’s announcement is swarmed with false replica accounts. These fakes steal WLFI’s profile photo and verbiage, but promote false links. While X has been a historically advantageous platform for Trump, even he can’t escape the app’s perpetual influx of scammers.
World Liberty Financial’s rocky start
What service World Liberty Financial plans to provide remains unclear. In his initial livestream announcement, Trump merely commented on how crypto would transform the financial system, before introducing WLFI’s leading entrepreneurs Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. CoinDesk acquired a white paper detailing the plan for WLFI, which would be built on the DeFi platform Aave and the Ethereum blockchain. Beyond that, exactly how WLFI will operate—and what they will even do—remains a mystery.
Even without a clear plan, WLFI opened its whitelist on Monday for sign-ups. Adding to the confusion were some strict outlines on just who could join: WLFI would only take the information of accredited U.S. investors and non-U.S. persons. Still, WLFI claimed the whitelist launch was a “massive success,” reporting that thousands of people had joined.
What was less successful, then, was their ability to fend off scammers on X. In the comment section of WLFI’s announcement post, multiple accounts are impersonating the crypto platform’s account and offering false links. They use similar handles: @worIdIiberty_fi, @worldlibertrft, and @worlbeidertyfi are just a few. They also use the same images as WLFI, including their profile photos, and often employ similar jargon.
These scammer posts are also curiously popular. One post carbon copying WLFI’s language has over 6,000 likes. Another, which urgently warns X users that trading would start in 24 hours (even though it remains unconfirmed whether trading will occur at all on WLFI), now has 1,200 likes and just under 500 reposts.
WLFI responded to this influx of scammers by ending their post with official “end of thread” images. All recent WLFI posts conclude with: “THIS IS THE LAST POST IN THIS THREAD. Any post below this that looks like us is likely a phishing scam.”
— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) September 30, 2024
The messy fusion of X and crypto
The WLFI scammer antics are yet another sign that, while X may be a favorable platform for Trump post-Elon Musk acquisition, he still cannot escape its pitfalls. Back in August, Trump once again struggled on X, this time in conversation with Musk himself. Their live chat was plagued by technical glitches, delays, and a contested DDoS attack.
X has become a bastion of crypto impersonation recently, with many public figures taking the hit.
Musk himself is a popular subject of replica accounts scamming for crypto: One Gizmodo report found that Musk and his companies’ names had been mentioned in thousands of FTC scam complaints. Even OpenAI’s press account on X was hacked to hawk crypto.
The effects can be seismic: Scam Sniffer, a crypto watchdog organization, found that 57,000 victims lost approximately $47 million from phishing scams in February. Their primary culprit: X impersonator accounts, similar to those clogging WLFI’s comments.
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