According to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the scammer posed as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, and sent a deceptive email on December 24, 2024. The sender used a lookalike domain “@t47lnaugural.com,” where the lowercase “l” replaced the legitimate “i,” making the domain appear nearly identical.
The victim transferred 250,300 USDT.ETH, a dollar-pegged stablecoin on Ethereum, to the scammer’s wallet on December 26 because they thought the email was authentic.
The funds were swiftly transferred between different wallets, which made it hard to retrieve it back. The FBI was able to track the transactions using blockchain analytics and recovered 40,300 USDT.ETH. The money that was recovered is now going through civil forfeiture to pay back the donor who was affected.
