Argentina’s Milei faces impeachment for promoting crypto scam
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. Argen...
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.
"The scam is believed to be the first cryptocurrency “rug-pull” to have been orchestrated with the help of a sitting president."
And almost certainly not the last.
There's a big fat dumb orange ape trying to pull the exact same stunt up north.
Trump did the same like a month later.
The day after the $LIBRA crash, Davis took to Twitter to “set the record straight.” In a video message, Davis concedes that “things didn’t go according to plan” with the meme token launch, but promises to re-inject the approximately $100 million they made from it back into the venture. Furthermore, Davis said he still continues to serve as “Javier Milei’s advisor,” and suggested they have no plans to stop the crypto collaboration. “I am working with him and his team on much bigger tokenization and really cool stuff in Argentina, and I absolutely back him.”
But in a subsequent written statement, Hayden heaped blame on Milei, accusing him of causing a “wave of panic selling” by deleting his X post and denouncing the project. “The sudden loss of confidence had a catastrophic impact on the token’s market stability,” he wrote. As other users quickly pointed out, though, Milei’s post wasn’t deleted until the coin had already crashed by over 80% of its peak value.
An hour and half later, Argentina’s Office of the President published a statement which characterized the entire scheme as the work of KIP Protocol – a company which helped create the token – and described Davis as affiliated purely with KIP, not the president. But it acknowledged that on Jan. 30 Milei had met with Davis, “who, according to the KIP Protocol representatives, would provide the technological infrastructure for his project.”
However, “Mr. Davis had no and does not have any connection with the Argentinean government” and was simply “was presented by representatives of KIP Protocol as one of their partners in the project,” the official statement insisted.
This stuff is wild, lol...