The Department of Justice is trying to recoup funds from an alleged Nigerian scammer who convinced victims to transfer the equivalent of $250,000 in the cryptocurrency Ethereum as a supposed donation to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee.
The DOJ, however, only lists two people as falling prey to the scam: “Ivan” and “Mouna,” according to the department’s complaint to the court, first reported by NOTUS.
Those are the same first names as the chief executive officer and U.S. chief financial officer of the crypto company MoonPay, Ivan Soto-Wright and Mouna Ammari Siala. The wallet used to pay the alleged scammer has also previously been publicly linked to Soto-Wright.
MoonPay did not respond to a detailed list of questions. The DOJ also did not respond to questions about why the first names of the scam victims were included in the complaint.
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MoonPay executives have publicly said the company has massively benefited from the Trump family’s embrace of crypto. MoonPay’s crypto transaction platform — which allows users to buy digital assets with a credit card, bank transfer or other traditional currencies — has been raking in cash in fees in recent months by facilitating purchases of Trump’s memecoin $TRUMP.
If the victims of the scam were, in fact, the top executives of MoonPay, “that smacks of favoritism or selective enforcement,” Mark Hays, a crypto regulation advocate with Americans for Financial Reform, told NOTUS, pointing to the Trump DOJ’s separate rollback of enforcement against crypto companies.
“If you’re friendly with Trump and you’re a Trump crypto bro, you get the DOJ proactively trying to recover your assets, even when there are not too many zeroes on a rounding sheet. But if you’re an average consumer and you lose your life savings because of a memecoin fronted by those same people, no one’s going to help you,” Hays added. “That doesn’t seem like justice.”
The DOJ included screenshots of two emails between the victims and the scammer in its complaint to the court. The first email was on Christmas Eve 2024, from the email address steve_witkoff@t47lnaugural, in which the first letter of “inaugural” was actually written with a lowercase L. The real Steve Witkoff was the co-chair of Trump’s inaugural committee.
The email said, “Hi Ivan & Mouna, Please find below the USDT wallet address and barcode for the contribution.”
A responding email from “Mouna” to the alleged scammer, with “Ivan” cc’d — both with last names and email address redacted by DOJ — reads, “Hi Steve- our contribution of $250k was just processed. Here is the confirmation,” with a link to a crypto transaction using a wallet independent trackers have also linked to MoonPay.
MoonPay has said it has experienced a massive windfall from the Trump family crypto businesses’ endorsement of its platforms.
“7 days ago, $TRUMP took the crypto world by storm,” MoonPay wrote on X in January. “We saw a 1,023% increase in first-time onchain transactions BIG WEEK!”
MoonPay’s president of enterprise, Keith Grossman, told the podcast “When Shift Happens,” “To put into context how big the Trump coin was and the Melania coin was … and how it impacted MoonPay: Over the course of a week, we onboarded 750,000 new consumers.”
MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright also has been a controversial figure in the digital asset world.
Soto-Wright was implicated in an investigation by the Federal Election Commission into an LLC accused of funneling $500,000 to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in 2022 while failing to disclose Soto-Wright as the true source of the funds. In March, the FEC declined to charge a civil penalty for the violation.
Separately, a 2022 class-action lawsuit accused celebrities of promoting essentially worthless NFTs, with the help of Soto-Wright, to enrich themselves and a handful of companies, including MoonPay.
The crypto wallet addresses Soto-Wright was accused of using to artificially inflate the price of the celebrity-backed NFTs, according to 2023 court records, includes the same wallet address the DOJ links to as paying the equivalent of $250,0000 in crypto to the alleged Nigerian scammer in December.
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