Crypto scammers who successfully hacked into United States President Donald Trump’s election campaign looking for payment in monero (XMR) appear to have sparked a new interest in the most popular privacy coin – albeit one that has failed to save it from a price slide.
The move has sent scores of Americans to search engines to hunt for data about XMR, with a spike recorded on the Google Trends analytics site on October 28.
Meanwhile, at pixel time (09:52 UTC), XMR, ranked 14th by market capitalization, trades at USD 133 and is down by 2% in a day, trimming its weekly gains to less than 9%.
The scammers appear to have hacked into the donaldjtrump.com site, replacing the contents with a bogus Department of Justice-approved notice stating that “this site has been seized.”
The hackers, who appeared more proficient in computer skills than English writing abilities, wrote,
“The world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president Donald J. Trump. It is time to allow the world to know truth [sic].”
The hackers also claimed to have a host of information, ranging from “origin” data on the coronavirus pandemic to juicy exposes on Trump himself provided by the President’s own family.
All they would need to finance their campaign, they claimed, was generous donations to two XMR addresses.
On Reddit, one poster opined that internet pranksters may have been behind the prank, writing,
“That takedown notice reeks of 4chan.”
Another claimed that the move could be “bullish for XMR.”
But one Redditor claimed on the same thread that they were still “too scared to buy monero.”
As for President Trump’s own feelings about crypto – well, he long ago made his own feelings on the matter crystal clear.
I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and b… https://t.co/0omEhZAtvw
__
Learn more:
The US Election: Pullback Possible, But Neither Trump Nor Biden Won’t Stop Bitcoin
Don’t Take Your Privacy For Granted As Regulators Get Anxious About Crypto
Upgraded Monero Is Best Performer Among Top 15 Coins Today
Monero Up On Major Compliance News, Zcash Still Down