Read the complaints submitted to the FTC by users of Donald Trump’s social media platform.
In 2022, Donald Trump founded Truth Social, a social media network where members of the MAGA faithful could congregate without interruption from leftists. The primary selling factor? It was the sole platform where Trump, who had been banned from Twitter over the entire coup attempt, was publicly posting his insane tirades. However, fresh records that Gizmodo was able to collect show that scammers are also a common sight on the website, defrauding people of large quantities of money. People who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short amount of time are the subject of our discussion.
For customer complaints about Truth Social filed in the last two years, Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC. The federal government has received complaints from a number of people, some of whom believe they were wrongfully barred from the website and others who allege they were accidentally added to mailing lists they never intended to be on. If nothing else, the allegations regarding scams are the most startling because such substantial amounts of money are at stake. Additionally, a sampling of the complete, unaltered complaints is available here.
One victim of $170,000 loss revealed they were first duped on another website, but they met someone on Truth Social who said they could assist in getting their money back. That turned out to be a scam as well. But more often, the victims are first contacted on Truth Social before being told to take the conversation somewhere else, like WhatsApp. Truth Social seems to be a target-rich environment for people who are easy to con.
One other noteworthy aspect of the complaints that have been submitted to the FTC is the apparent prevalence of senior Donald Trump supporters among them. A 72-year-old man was conned out of $21,000 after he claimed to have been conversing with a “beautiful” woman on the website. He concludes his protest by saying, “I haven’t told my wife about this error. She is still unaware of it. An individual in their 60s reported losing $500,000 to con artists on Truth Social. Seemingly hopeful about a potential recovery, they told the FTC, “After I pay this they promise there will be no more fees and I will receive my assets.”
It appears that many people are unaware that any amount they may see on their end that is purportedly in an account is entirely imaginary. Scammers frequently grant their victims access to a website that displays a specific amount of money in “their” account, but the money has already disappeared. It’s not just waiting for them to give up. It’s all just a con to make the victim feel as though they are making more “investments” by making their imagined money grow.
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Social media platforms are full of scams of many types. We recently investigated, through FOIA requests to the FTC, the sextortion on Grindr and the scams on Ashley Madison dating apps. However, it seems that the most popular scam on Truth Social is pig butchering, which is a ruse to win someone over and demand ever-larger sums of money while pretending the victim is making profitable investments. Truth Social seems to be a tempting target for con artists operating pig butchering operations because of its elderly user base, which consists of Boomers with access to retirement accounts and a lifetime of money.
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