The latest hiccup in Trump’s crypto launch: Deleted posts and a hacking claim

The X accounts of two family members of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appeared to have been hacked on Tuesday in order to promote a scam aimed at cashing in on the Trump family’s nascent crypto venture.

The hacks come as the former president prepares to release his crypto policy platform and his campaign wrestles with the fallout of a foreign cyberattack.

Shortly after 8:15 p.m. ET, the X account belonging to Trump’s daughter-in-law, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump appeared to announce that the digital currency project, dubbed World Liberty Financial, had been launched.

The account provided several links to Trump’s 1.7 million followers to a coin and websites claiming to be “the only official channels of World Liberty Financial.” 

One minute later, Donald Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany Trump’s X account also posted an endorsement and a website link. 

The website linked to in the Trump family posts had been created earlier in the day Tuesday and registered via an anonymous domain hosting platform called Njalla Okta LLC, according to domain lookup site WhoIs.com.

Domiciled in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, Njalla Okta was created by a cofounder of The Pirate Bay, a dark-web marketplace. All of which makes it nearly impossible for the public to trace the identity of the person behind the fake World Liberty Financial sites.

A few minutes after Lara Trump’s posts, her husband, Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump, appeared to use his own X account to write “This is a scam!!” He wrote that his wife and his sister’s “profiles have been compromised.” 

All of these posts, including Eric Trump’s warning, have since been deleted. But not before screenshots captured the contents. 

Spokespeople for the Trump presidential campaign and the Trump Organization did not reply to requests for comment Tuesday about the reported hacks, or the status of the Trump crypto venture. CNBC also contacted Eric Trump for comment via X, and did not immediately receive a reply.

The incident is the latest apparent stumble in the Trump family’s effort to launch a crypto platform.

Since June, multiple digital tokens supposedly backed by the Trump team or members of the Trump family have launched. CNBC could not independently verify that any of them were directly connected to the billionaire Republican presidential nominee’s family. 

One was dubbed DJT, the same call letters as Trump Media Technology Group’s ticker symbol on the Nasdaq exchange. The coin pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars before the founders pulled the funds in early August, sending the coin plummeting in value. 

The World Liberty project already appears to have missed one deadline last week, for a planned announcement. 

The project comes in the wake of Trump’s keynote speech this summer at the annual Bitcoin Conference in which he declared his intent, among other things, to create a national reserve of Bitcoin if elected president. 

Trump has been keen to ally himself with the crypto crowd, which has proven to be the largest single industry source of donations to either party this campaign cycle. Nearly half of all the corporate funds donated this election cycle have been from the crypto industry.

Tuesday’s incident appeared to affect the price of solana, a separate cryptocurrency token named in the supposedly fake posts. Immediately after they were sent, the price of solana fell 9% before recovering to about $126.  

Lara Trump had described an accompanying governance token on solana which would support the DeFi lending protocol, World Liberty Financial.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, describes a parallel banking system which cuts out middlemen like banks and lawyers and replaces them with something known as smart contracts, which are pieces of code that self-execute when certain conditions are met.