The website of a cryptocurrency venture promoted by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump uses an anonymous privacy service that has been previously linked to Russian cybercriminals, Newsweek has found.
World Liberty Financials’ website is registered to a domain host that provides privacy solutions via Withheld for Privacy, a service based in Iceland that allows websites to hide the details of their domains.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by World Liberty Financial in using the services of Withheld for Privacy, but it raises questions over what exactly the company is, who is behind it and how it will do business.
World Liberty Financial declined to comment to Newsweek. A Trump representative did not respond to Newsweek’s request for comment.
Trump and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have posted about World Liberty Financial on social media, although full details of the project are yet to be announced.
Jay Kesten, a law professor who specializes in corporate governance at Florida State University College of Law, said: “At the early stages of a crypto rollout, it’s not unusual to see multiple affiliated business entities or to have various privacy measures in place. That said, if and when a crypto offer is made to the public, investors should be entitled to full and fair disclosure of a broad array of information.”
According to the who.is website, World Liberty Financials’ website was registered on June 21, 2024 to Namecheap, a website registrar that outsources domain privacy services to Withheld for Privacy.
Withheld for Privacy was set up in 2021 by Sergio Raygoza Hernandez, a Mexican living in the United States, and based at an address in Reykjavik, Iceland, a country considered a leader in internet freedom as it allows total anonymity, according to Icelandic business filing data.
Neither Namecheap nor Withheld for Privacy responded to Newsweek’s requests for comment. A number listed on Withheld for Privacy’s website did not connect. Newsweek was unable to reach Hernandez for comment.
Withheld for Privacy has previously been accused of concealing the identities of bad actors.
According to a July 2021 malware analysis report, the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) linked ransomware created by the Russian cyber hacking group DarkSide to two websites hosted by Withheld for Privacy.
In May 2021, Withheld for Privacy was ordered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to hand over disputed domain names to the financial services company Comercia Bank, after it filed a complaint with WIPO, a United Nations agency.
The complaint accused Withheld for Privacy of helping scammers create similarly named websites to trick customers and said it had “registered and used the disputed domain names in bad faith.”
Withheld for Privacy is rated as “Suspicious” by Dutch scam identifier website ScamAdviser.
“This registrar has a high percentage of spammers and fraud sites,” a report on the website said. “The domain registration company seems to attract websites with a low to very low trust score.”
Other websites that have concealed registration details using the Icelandic domain include a suspected fake bank and websites impersonating exchange platform Coinbase and technology company Apple, according to posts on web chat groups.
Namecheap has itself been accused of links to malicious actors although it also hosts many major businesses.
Domain reputation organization Spamhaus listed Namecheap as the second most abused domain registrar in the last quarter of 2021.
In 2023, the international law firm Latham & Watkins said unidentified cybercriminals were using domain names registered to two companies, Namecheap and Above, to try to scam clients—although neither of those companies was named in the lawsuit.
Questions remain over what exactly World Liberty Financial is and what it will do. There is no information about the project on its website, only a link to its X and Telegram accounts which say it is building a decentralized finance service that will “make crypto and America great by driving the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.”
Its trademark, which cost $700, was filed in July and is owned by AMG Software Solutions, a company that was also registered in July to an address in Puerto Rico, but is legally registered to the business-friendly state of Delaware in July 2024, filings show.
Newsweek contacted AMG Software Solutions by email to comment on this story.
AMG Software Solutions’ assigned agent, meaning an entity legally assigned to act on behalf of a business, is Corporations Service Company (CSC), a Delaware company that provides and manages corporations’ domains by acting as a management intermediary between a business and the state. It provides legal and tax services such as auditing and accounting on behalf of businesses.
World Liberty Financials’ and AMG Software Solutions’ legal counsel is Alex Golubitsky, he confirmed to Newsweek but declined to comment further on this story.
Crypto news publication CoinDesk, said it had obtained a draft white paper indicating how World Liberty Financial will be run and listing key staff as including Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, who cofounded Subify, a content creation app without censorship. Newsweek has not obtained a copy of this white paper to verify its contents.
Newsweek contacted Folkman and Herro by email for comment.
