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Back when Donald Trump was president, there were all sorts of grifters who used his name to cheat Trump supporters out of money. The most famous of those sleazy efforts was We Build the Wall, which involved several high-profile Trumpers skimming money from donations ostensibly meant to be used to build a segment of border wall.
(Sidebar: The most notable Build the Wall grifter was Steve Bannon, who got a pardon from Trump for his alleged misdeeds, leading to his being charged in New York State. Because he has a pending felony case, Bannon is not eligible to serve his upcoming 4-month stint for contempt of Congress in a cushy white-collar prison, and may well end up at Rikers Island for part of his sentence. Yes, contempt of Congress is a federal crime and Rikers is a New York City jail, but if Bannon's NYS trial commences during his prison sentence, Rikers is likely where he would be held so as to be able to be in court each day. That's your bonus schadenfreude of the week.)
In any event, now that Trump himself is busy raising money by the bushel (see above), the grifters are back, too. And we don't just mean the grifters who try to cash in on Trump's cult-like adoration by selling ridiculous commemorative gold coins and chess sets and bobbleheads. We mean people who outright steal money that was intended for Trump.
This comes from a report published this week by Netcraft, which is an anti-cybercrime firm. The scammy websites are running an unsophisticated scheme; they've just registered domain names that are very similar to donaldjtrump.com but aren't actually donaldjtrump.com, like doonaldjtrump.com or donaldbjtrump.com. The folks running these sites update them regularly to track changes made to Trump's actual website. For example, the picture on the left is what the real Trump website looked like on the day that reader J.H. in Bend, OR, brought this story to our attention, while the picture on the right is what donaldbjtrump.com looked like:
As you can see, they are almost identical. That said, the scammers sometimes make tweaks here and there in order to increase their take. For example, the real Trump site invites you to donate $2,000, end of sentence. The fake site invites you to donate $2,000, so you can have dinner with Trump. From where we sit, $2,000 and no dinner with Trump is far and away the preferable option, if we absolutely must choose. But we are not the target demo for these scammers.
In the end, it's another reminder that he who lives by the grift, dies by the grift. Trump has been a sleazy operator, and it's not surprising that an enormous percentage of the people in his orbit are sleazy operators. And, as a complement to that, Trump has spent his entire political career fleecing the sheep. It's entirely predictable that other sleazy operators, whether they are in Trump's orbit or not, would come along and take a crack at the flock. (Z)