Melania Trump is suspected of buying her own NFTs while hiding her transaction with a second wallet. The former First Lady of the United States indeed launched a collection at the beginning of January, which sold for 270,000 dollars, or around 237,000 euros. After investigation, it seems that the buyer and the seller are the same person.
You may have missed it (we won’t blame you), but Melania Trump got into NFTs. After a first collection on the Solana blockchain, a second arrived in January this year. Named “Head of State” and including a drawing of the former First Lady of the United States wearing the white hat worn during her first State dinner in 2018, the latter sold for 1800 SOL, or approximately €237,000 at the time of the transaction. A nice sum that now raises many suspicions.
Indeed, several experts accuse Melania Trump of having used the technique of wash trading to drive up the prices of his collection. Increasingly popular with followers of dishonest cryptos, this consists of buying your own NFT to artificially raise speculation. Unfortunately for the seller, all transactions are recorded on the blockchain, which makes it possible to find the digital address of the wallets used. However, there is a good a link between the wallet that published the collection and the one that won the auction.
Melania Trump is suspected of inflating the price of her NFTs
It turns out that the winner of the auction received 1800 SOL from the wallet that put the NFT on sale, before having spent these 1800 SOL precisely to buy the NFT in question. And it does not stop there. Shortly after the sale, the seller again paid 1800 SOL to the buyer. All this is therefore very suspicious and seems to hide that the two wallets belong to two complicit entities, or even to the same person.
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Melania Trump has not yet given her version of the facts, but as much to say that the doubt is allowed. It’s not the first time that the Trump couple are accused of cheating in their digital affairs. At the launch of Truth, the social network created by Donald Trump, it was discovered that the former president discreetly stole the source code of another platform.
Source: Vice
