Trump’s meme coin sparks more than 700 copycats posing as official crypto

Despite once calling cryptocurrency “a scam”, Donald Trump made a theoretical fortune of billions after launching a self-named and highly controversial meme coin immediately before his second inauguration in January.

Now an army of digital imposters is trying to cash in on the president’s name and online presence to make their own crypto killing, according to a report in the Financial Times that details hundreds of “copycat and spam coins” uploaded to Trump’s official wallet in cyberspace.

Creators sent more than 700 new meme coins to the wallet in recent weeks, many named after Trump or his family members – but none of them have any formal connection.

Experts say speculators can be easily duped by names that make it seem the fake coins are allied to the real $Trump cryptocurrency – which itself has seen a precipitous collapse in value – and risk the digital equivalent of being taken to the cleaners.

Eswar Prasad, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an economics professor at Cornell University, told the FT that by launching his own coin, Trump had “opened the floodgates to deception … and at a minimum to rampant speculation”.

Ordinary investors buying fake or copycat coins, he said, “just exposes them to enormous risk”.

More than 200 of the fake coins have had Trump family names, including Official Trump and Official Melania.

The first lady launched her own official meme coin, $Melania, within days of her husband, which analysts say immediately halved the value of $Trump and sparked a slide that has continued since.

The names of four of Trump’s five children have also been popular among the copycats, with his youngest son, Barron, accounting for 30, his daughter Ivanka next with 26, and older sons Don and Eric Jr with 14 between them.

Other new cryptocurrency found in the Trump wallet featured names including “Elon” and “Musk”, referring to the world’s richest man and presidential acolyte currently taking a wrecking ball to US federal institutions as a designated “special government employee”.

Six of the fake coins used the same name and symbol as Trump’s official currency, while others were more obvious scams, including Official Hitler and Poo Coin.

So keen were the scammers to get in on the act, the FT said, that fakes began appearing almost immediately after the real thing.

The first copycat coin was “minted” within 29 minutes of the announcement of the official Trump coin on his Truth Social platform on 18 January, while a speculator ahead of the game deposited the first Melania coin into the Trump digital wallet more than a day before the authentic version was launched.

Trump’s dalliance with the crypto market, meanwhile, has drawn strong criticism from ethics watchdogs, economists and some industry insiders.

Prasad told the Guardian last month: “The Trump meme coin represents the intersection of Trump’s grifting tendencies and his administration’s embrace of cryptocurrencies, along with his dismissive attitude toward government regulation.”