Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.

The Existentialist Republic

SubscribeSign in

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Are Running a $1.2 Billion Felony Fraud Scheme that is Fully Prosecutable in New York.<br>Other crypto founders are serving eight, twelve, and twenty-five years in prison for the same conduct. The only thing that separates the Trump sons from those men is their last name.

Christopher Armitage<br>May 24, 2026

817

89<br>422

Share

Joe Kohen/Getty Images

A note from the author. What you are about to read is an article that outlines the evidence of criminal conduct under New York State law, all with sources available directly in hyperlinks in the text. After the article is a script you can use to report this conduct to the officials who seem to be ignoring it. After that you’ll find over a dozen books, booklets, and model legislation to share with your representative, all for free from The Existentialist Republic.

Subscribe

This article will show you two sets of men. The first set committed specific acts at their cryptocurrency companies, faced prosecution, were convicted, and are serving years in federal prison right now. The second set is Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who committed acts that the publicly available evidence already documents at their own cryptocurrency venture. We will lay the conduct of both sets side by side, act for act, and the conduct will match. Then we will ask you to find the difference between the men in prison and the two men who are not, and we will give you the name and the phone number of the offices that can answer that question for you.<br>Braden Karony ran a cryptocurrency called SafeMoon. He told the people who bought SafeMoon tokens that the pool of money backing the token was locked, so that company insiders could not withdraw it. The pool was not locked, and insiders withdrew the money. In April 2026 a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Karony to one hundred months in prison. One hundred months is eight years and four months, and the sentence was punishment for telling buyers a false statement about how the token worked.<br>Alex Mashinsky ran a company called Celsius that told customers it was a crypto bank where ordinary people could deposit their savings and earn interest. Mashinsky told customers to keep their deposits in Celsius while he sold his own holdings, and he told customers the company was financially sound while its balance sheet held a $1.2 billion hole. When Celsius froze withdrawals in 2022, about 1.7 million customers were locked out of roughly $4.7 billion in assets. A federal judge sentenced Mashinsky to twelve years in prison.<br>Remember Karony and Mashinsky, because this article compares their conduct to the conduct of two other men.<br>Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump founded a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial. In the sixteen months after World Liberty launched its token in late 2024, the venture generated at least $1.2 billion in cash for the Trump family, which is more cash than Donald Trump’s real estate business produced in the eight years from 2010 to 2017. World Liberty’s governing documents direct seventy-five percent of token sale revenue to a Trump family entity. This article sets out how World Liberty took in money, what World Liberty told the people who bought its token, and how that conduct matches the conduct that sent Karony and Mashinsky to prison. No prosecutor has filed a case.<br>World Liberty Financial launched in October 2024 and described its product as decentralized finance. The word decentralized was the central sales claim. Decentralized means that no single person or company controls the money, that the rules are fixed in public computer code rather than set by a company executive, and that every token holder shares control by voting. World Liberty repeated the claim in its marketing. World Liberty called its product a decentralized governance platform and invited ordinary people to buy the token on the strength of that claim. A legal analysis published by Duke University later concluded that the structure was issuer-controlled governance with a voting feature rather than decentralized governance.<br>The decentralization claim was false, and the falsehood was written into the computer code itself.<br>World Liberty’s smart contract contained an administrative function that allowed the company to freeze any token holder’s wallet, which stopped that holder from transferring or selling their tokens. One investor, Justin Sun, states that World Liberty did not disclose this freezing function to the people buying the token, and Sun describes the freezing function as a hidden trap door. Sun is not a bystander. He founded the major blockchain Tron, he invested roughly $45 million in World Liberty, and the venture named him an advisor. Sun has direct knowledge of the freezing function, because in September 2025 World Liberty used the...