MoonPay Executives as Victims of $250K Scam

A recent filing from the Department of Justice, seeking to recover cryptocurrency obtained through fraud, has inadvertently disclosed that the victims are the CEO and CFO of MoonPay, a crypto payment firm. The document reveals that two individuals transferred $250,300 in USDT to someone impersonating Steve Witkoff, who co-chaired President Trump’s inaugural committee. Investigations showed that the recipient's wallet belonged to Ehiremen Aigbokhan from Lagos, Nigeria. Despite being named only as "Ivan" and "Mouna" in the filing, it has been pointed out that Ivan Soto-Wright is the CEO and Mouna Ammari Siala is the CFO of MoonPay. Furthermore, a wallet associated with the fraudulent transaction has been identified as a MoonPay wallet. Another lawsuit from 2023 claims that Soto-Wright used the same wallet to fund a personal account. MoonPay has yet to respond to requests for comments regarding these matters. The scam appears rudimentary; the scammer's email replaced a capital 'I' with a lowercase 'l', a common trick to create visually similar addresses. Both emails linked to the scam, steve_witkoff@t47lnaugural.com and financersvp@t47lnaugural.com, were traced back to Nigeria, rather than the U.S. MoonPay, which received approval in June to operate in all 50 U.S. states with a BitLicense from New York regulators, is now faced with significant scrutiny due to this incident. Note: The Block is a media outlet that provides news and data about the crypto industry.