A new lawsuit is pulling Melania Trump’s cryptocurrency venture back into the spotlight — and not for the reasons her team might have hoped.
Court filings this week accuse the creators behind the former first lady’s digital coin, $MELANIA, of orchestrating a classic pump-and-dump scheme that left small investors holding the bag. The coin, which debuted in January, is one of several Trump-themed tokens that surged briefly before crashing in value.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, names executives at Meteora, the crypto exchange where the $MELANIA coin first launched. Plaintiffs say those executives secretly bought up large quantities of the token immediately after its release, then resold their holdings as prices skyrocketed — allegedly pocketing millions while ordinary investors lost nearly everything.
The $MELANIA token opened at just a few cents on January 19, one day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Within hours, it spiked to $13.73, only to collapse to about 10 cents by week’s end — a drop of more than 99 percent. Its companion coin, $TRUMP, also tumbled from a peak of $45 to around $5.79.
According to court documents, the investors claim the architects of the coins “knew the value would plummet” and used the Trump family’s name recognition to fuel a speculative frenzy. “They used Melania Trump and other recognizable figures as window dressing to lend credibility to what was essentially a fraud,” the filing states.
Melania Trump herself is not named as a defendant. The plaintiffs say they don’t believe she played a role in the scheme, though her likeness and name were central to the token’s marketing. Neither the Trump family nor the Meteora platform has publicly commented on the allegations.
According to the Financial Times, Trump-branded coins and crypto-linked partnerships have generated more than $1 billion in pre-tax profits over the past year alone.
The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have not yet announced any parallel investigations, but analysts say the lawsuit could push regulators to examine how the Trump-affiliated coins were promoted — and whether investors were misled.
Pump-and-dump schemes have long haunted the crypto world: promoters hype a digital asset, drive prices sky-high through coordinated trading, then sell before the crash. What’s new here is the political celebrity branding — an extra layer of credibility that, for many small investors, blurred the line between politics, fandom, and finance.
If the claims are proven, the $MELANIA coin’s brief rise and spectacular fall may become another cautionary tale in an industry built as much on personality as on code.
