Scammers target Trump supporters - and bad spellers - after Republican announced he’d take crypto donations

Scammers are going after Trump supporters after the former president announced last month that his campaign would take donations in cryptocurrency.

Cybercrime detection firm Netcraft found dozens of websites trying to trick supporters of Donald Trump to hand over their crypto, Wired reported. The firm found just before the announcement was made, scammers registered domains with common misspellings to lure Trump supporters intending to visit donaldjtrump.com.

For instance, donalbjtrump.com was an almost complete copy of the former president’s website.

The Trump campaign takes donations via the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, but a number of the scam sites seem to use exchanges intended to look like the blockchain and crypto payment processor Coingate. Their hope is that people donate to the fake sites, believing they are giving money to the Republicans candidate.

The head of research at Netcraft, Rob Duncan, told Wired that “As a victim, the fact that the real campaign is using Coinbase payments rather than direct cryptocurrencies” wouldn’t be clear.

“The way it’s been advertised is ‘Donald Trump’s taking cryptocurrency donations,’ when actually that’s quite it’s a bit more subtle,” Duncan said.

He added none of the crypto scams appear to be fruitful just yet, but he noted that that may be because they’re new and may not yet be active.

More fake sites appeared after Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in a corrupt scheme to influence the 2016 election by covering up an affair with adult actor Stormy Daniels.

The campaign raised more than $34m in the hours following his conviction. Scammers appeared to foresee this surge in interest and were ready to take advantage.

“Criminals