Posts claiming Nigerian ‘Yahoo boy' scammed Trump out of $250k are misleading
'Yahoo' is Nigerian slang for internet fraud.
Image
Screenshot of the misleading post, taken July 8, 2025
Shared more than 3,000 times, the post was published by an account called 'Shola', a self-proclaimed life coach with over 373,000 followers.
Comments under the post suggest that some readers believe it is genuine.
'If these guys get the chance, they'll scam God,' one commenter wrote.
'Scammed a whole Donald Trump? Bro playing fraud on Hall of Fame difficulty,' added another user.
The claim was also shared elsewhere on X (here and here) and on Facebook in English (here) and French (here).
Nigerian internet fraud
The Economic and Financial Crime Commission reported in May that cybercrime, advance fee fraud and money laundering accounted for the highest number of offences out of the record-breaking 4,111 total convictions by the agency in 2024 — in a country where 70% of the population is under the age of 30 (archived here and here).
Several high-profile cyber-fraud cases have been linked to Nigerians outside the country.
Nigerian Instagram influencer Ramon Olorunwa Abbas was handed an 11-year jail term in the United States in 2022 after being found guilty of conspiring 'to launder tens of millions of dollars through a series of online scams' (archived here).
Abidemi Rufai, a politician and aide to the Ogun state governor in southwest Nigeria, was also convicted in the US for a similar crime in 2022 (archived here). He was sacked after his crime came to light.
However, the claim that a Nigerian 'Yahoo boy' scammed Trump is misleading.
Misleading claim
Official records from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) confirm that there was a $250,300 cryptocurrency scam, but Donald Trump was not the direct victim (archived here).
The funds were actually fraudulently diverted from a donor intending to support the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, after scammers impersonated Steve Witkoff, the committee's co-chair and finance director.
Prosecutors filed a complaint in a federal court that fraudsters sent emails from a domain posing as the official inaugural account. The scammers used the address@t47lnaugural.com, with a lowercase 'L' replacing the 'i' in the legitimate @t47inaugural.com, to solicit over $250,000 in USDT.ETH cryptocurrency (archived here).
The victim transferred the funds, which were quickly moved across multiple cryptocurrency wallets, including a Nigeria-based Binance account linked to the name Ehiremen Aigbokhan.
'It appeared likely that Aigbokhan received an international transfer of funds from the U.S. to Nigeria as a result of his fraudulent activity,' prosecutors said in the document.
The suspect allegedly used several crypto wallets and exchanges to launder the money.
The FBI seized a total of 40,353 USDT.ETH that the federal agency said was connected to the fraud, with about half taken from Aigbokhan's accounts. Digital forensics linked him to the Binance account that received part of the stolen funds.
The FBI is now seeking Aigbokhan's arrest.
International media, including The Independent UK and American magazine Fortune, reported on the case (archived here and here).
The story was covered by multiple Nigerian newspapers, some of whose headlines may have created confusion. One titled its article "How Lagos Yahoo Boy duped U.S. President Donald Trump of 2025 inauguration funds" while another used the headline "FBI pursues Lagos Yahoo Boy for defrauding U.S. President Donald Trump of 2025 inauguration funds" before going on to explain in the text that a donor was scammed.
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