A complaint made public by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on July 11, 2025, reveals that executives of cryptocurrency firm MoonPay became victims of a $250,000 Ethereum scam when donating to what they believed was Trump's inauguration fund in December 2024. While the complaint does not explicitly name the victims, the document contains the first names Ivan and Mouna and an Ethereum wallet address linked to the fraud that matches MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright and CFO Mouna Ammari Siala's details, notably during a period when MoonPay had established an official partnership to launch Trump's memecoin, which according to NOTUS brought the platform over 750,000 new users.
According to documents released by the DOJ, the scammer was a Nigerian national who impersonated Steve Witkoff, co-chair of Trump's inaugural committee, using the email address steve_witkoff@t47lnaugural.com where the first letter in inaugural was a lowercase l instead of a capital i to spoof a legitimate organisation. The case filed by the DOJ was briefly sealed in full before being swiftly unsealed, with acting U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro blaming court clerks for the confusion, stating that "the court made a ministerial, clerical error that, as soon as we realized it, within hours, the whole docket was unsealed," adding that prosecutors never requested the full case to be sealed, only that the original complaint be sealed to redact a company's name. The handling of the case has attracted criticism within the crypto community, with some suggesting the DOJ prioritises cases involving Trump allies, while crypto regulation advocate Mark Hays commented that if you're friendly with Trump, you get the DOJ proactively trying to recover your assets, even when there are not too many zeroes on the rounding sheet, but if you're an average consumer, and you lose your life savings... no one's going to help you.
MoonPay has not issued a public statement regarding the filing, while the company's political affiliations continue to strengthen within the cryptocurrency industry; in May 2024, MoonPay donated $1 million to Stand With Crypto, a political action group supporting pro-crypto legislation, citing growing regulatory pressure as its motivation. Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings from April showed that several crypto firms and executives made substantial donations to Trump's 2024 inauguration fund, including $1 million from Solana Labs, over $245,000 from Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, and $100,000 from Consensys, while following Trump's re-election, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now led by acting chair Mark Uyeda, has closed a number of enforcement cases against donors, including those against Uniswap and Consensys.
Sources:
Emma Roth
According to a DOJ court complaint, a Nigerian scammer posed as a Trump-affiliated fundraiser and may have targeted two high-ranking MoonPay executives—including its CEO and CFO—to solicit $250,000 in donations.:contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
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