MoonPay executives may have sent $250,000 to Nigerian scammer, DoJ filing suggests

A Department of Justice filing aiming to recover fraudulently obtained cryptocurrency may have inadvertently revealed the scam's victims as the CEO and CFO of crypto payment firm MoonPay, as first reported by NOTUS.

The filing, which aims to seize around $40,350 in $USDT frozen by Tether, reveals that two victims sent $250,300 in $USDT to a person posing as Steve Witkoff, co-chair of the President Trump's inaugural committee. However, records obtained from Binance revealed that the wallet that received the funds was registered to Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a man based in Lagos, Nigeria.

The victims are identified in the filing only as "Ivan" and "Mouna." However, as NOTUS noticed, Crypto payment firm Moonpay's CEO is Ivan Soto-Wright and its CFO is Mouna Ammari Siala. Furthermore, a wallet involved in the $250,300 transaction is listed by Etherscan as a MoonPay wallet.

A separate lawsuit filed in 2023 alleged Soto-Wright used the same wallet to fund a personal wallet. MoonPay did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Block.

While some scams in crypto have sophisticated on-chain exploits at their root, this scam appears to be simpler: the scammer's email, [email protected], contained a lowercase 'L' instead of a capital 'I,' a common tactic used to disguise one address as another, as the two letters look identical in many sans-serif fonts. The scammer used another address disguised in a similar manner: [email protected].

"IP geolocation data consistently showed emails from these accounts originating from Nigeria, and not the United States," the filing states. "It appeared likely that Aigbokhan received an international transfer of funds from the U.S. to Nigeria as a result of his fraudulent activity."

MoonPay in June received approval to offer its services in all 50 U.S. states after receiving a BitLicense from New York regulators.