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Cryptocurrency News Articles

The Trump Coin Appears to Be a Pump-and-Dump Scam

Jan 31, 2025 at 08:00 pm

At 02:01:33 am UTC on January 18, a crypto trader identified only by their wallet address—an alphanumeric string ending in J9tXv—purchased $1.1 million worth of TRUMP

The Trump Coin Appears to Be a Pump-and-Dump Scam

A crypto trader identified only by their wallet address—an alphanumeric string ending in J9tXv—purchased $1.1 million worth of TRUMP, a new cryptocurrency launched by US president Donald Trump. The trade stands out partly for its size but mostly for its timing: Trump had publicly unveiled the coin barely two minutes earlier.

In the minutes immediately after the announcement, other traders purchased similarly large amounts of TRUMP: One invested $500,000, two others $250,000 apiece, and another $50,000. Like J9tXv, their identities are concealed behind their crypto wallet addresses.

As the hours passed, word spread, investors piled in, and the price of TRUMP soared. At its peak, the value of the circulating coins exceeded $14 billion. The early traders, who had made a killing, began to cash out.

On January 18, J9tXv moved their entire TRUMP stash to another wallet. The lion’s share of the coins were then diverted to yet further wallets and mostly sold. The remainder were sold the following day across nine transactions, which brought in more than $30 million. In all, the original trade returned many tens of millions of dollars in profit.

WIRED asked two experts in crypto forensics to analyze these early TRUMP trades. Though multiple theories might explain their striking punctuality—among them blind luck—another possibility is that the traders were warned of the launch in advance, the crypto forensics experts hypothesize. In trading any new asset, an alleged early warning would put any trader at an immense advantage, allowing them to buy in earlier and at a lower price than almost everyone else.

“To be that quick off the mark, it’s hard to imagine that they had no forewarning,” says Paul Sibenik, CEO at CryptoForensic Investigators, a company that investigates crypto-related cybercrime.

Though new crypto coins are frequently traded in the minutes after launch, the willingness of J9tXv and others to wager such large sums on TRUMP in those early moments—when people were still trying to figure out whether the coin was legitimate—is highly irregular, says John Powers, president at the private investigation agency Hudson Intelligence.

“Someone that has an active investment portfolio or team of people that are managing money could certainly put together a plan and make an informed decision within twelve to twenty-four hours,” alleges Powers. “But something that happens in the first 90 seconds suggests either potential advanced insider knowledge or some other possible explanation.”

The White House press office declined to comment. A request for comment delivered to the email address listed on the TRUMP website went unanswered.

TRUMP is pitched as a memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency that typically serves no purpose, promises no utility, and has no underlying business model. The price of a memecoin tends to swing violently with the caprices of the public mood.

In the memecoin trading game, getting in early is everything. “There’s no fundamental value in any of these coins, so it’s about just being very, very early,” says Aurelie Barthere, principal research analyst at the blockchain analytics company Nansen, which analyzed patterns in the trading data for WIRED.

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Other articles published on Feb 01, 2025