Argentina’s Milei faces impeachment for promoting crypto scam

The Argentinean president branded himself as an edgy economic genius to ride a wave of financial discontent to power. Now he’s implicated in one of the biggest scams in history, wiping out over $4 billion in market cap in a few hours, leaving Argentineans wondering if they’ve also been rugged. Argentina’s President Javier Milei has been accused of fraud, and is likely to face impeachment charges, after he promoted a sham cryptocurrency token which allowed a handful of con artists to dupe crypto owners out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day. The scam is believed to be the first cryptocurrency “rug-pull” to have been orchestrated with the help of a sitting president. While the exact number of victims is unknown, around 75,000 people are suspected to have been swindled, and a judge has been appointed to investigate after at least 100 criminal complaints were filed against Milei in Argentina in the days since.

Crypto token $LIBRA jumped massively in value after Milei endorsed it on social media on Feb. 14, posting a link to purchase the coin and lauding the “private project” for “encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy, funding small business and Argentine ventures.” Milei went as far as framing the coin as a legitimate investment, writing, “the world wants to invest in Argentina.”

The URL for the $LIBRA token’s official website, vivalalibertadproject.com, was a clear nod to Milei’s campaign slogan, “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” The page, which remains online, says the coin was being launched “in honor of Javier Milei’s libertarian ideas” and was “designed to strengthen the Argentine economy from the ground up by supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.”

The token immediately shot up from $0.27 to well over $4, then dropped to less than $0.20 in a matter of hours as a tiny handful of insiders who owned over 80% of the supply dumped their holdings, draining an estimated $280 million from the unsuspecting buyers. While horrified owners discovered they’d been victimized by a classic “pump-and-dump” scheme, Milei promptly deleted his post publicizing the coin.

In their place, Milei published a new message attempting to wash his hands of the matter, insisting he’d merely been “supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever.”

“I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet),” he wrote.

But a number of social media posts make clear that Milei had previously interacted with at least three of the scheme’s operators, and met with two of them on multiple occasions. Further, the claim that Milei was “not aware of the details of the project” is contradicted by a prior statement he gave to Bloomberg in which he insisted that the project was “real” and involved “pure private financing.”

Just two weeks before the scam’s culmination, Milei uploaded a photo to Instagram showing him posing beside Hayden Mark Davis, one of the creators of the $LIBRA coin. As of publication, the post remains online.