Forget DOGE—Crypto Hackers Insert Fake Trump Nudes Into His X Posts

This wins the prize for oddest story of the week. With all attention on DOGE reworking the U.S. federal government and DeepSeek reworking the U.S. versus China tech war, crypto scammers have quietly sneaked in via the back door and done their thing.

As spotted by journalist Matt Binder, “President Donald Trump’s posts on X were hijacked last week after an exploit was discovered on the link shortener platform Bitly by crypto pump and dump scammers.” The Bitly hijack added fake nudes of the president to seemingly unrelated posts, which then pushed their pump and dump scheme with ‘newly created’ tokens available to buy at the end of that hacked link.”

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As Gizmodo reports, “many of Trump’s old tweets were hijacked in this fashion. Most memorably, one of them, which mentions one of Trump’s appearances on the Sean Hannity show on Fox, was hacked to redirect viewers to the hackers’ memecoin site. The image embedded in the new link includes what looks like a nude Donald Trump getting hosed with a spray tan gun: ‘YUGE,’ the new image reads. ‘YUGE ASF’.”

Another “Follow me on Instagram,” tweet, per Binder, “once included a short link from Bitly that forwarded users to Trump’s Instagram. However, after the crypto scammers discovered the Bitly bug, they were able to take over Trump’s old Bitly link that went to his Instagram and instead directed users to their newly-minted ‘DJT’ memecoin.”

The hack seemed to persist for an unusual amount of time, but has now been stopped in its tracks with a Bitly fix — the images no longer show. I have not included copies of the faked posts here, but they are still available in Binder’s article.

The hack exploits the random combination of numbers and letters used in such short codes, making it impossible to know where it’s leading until you get there. When customizing such links, the platform will stop you duplicating an existing shortcode, But Binder explains that “it appears that there was a bug in Bitly that allowed users to create a custom back-half that was previously in use if the original link or Bitly account that created the link was deleted or deactivated.”

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Clearly this is not a genuine attack on either Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account or even Bitly. It’s just an opportunistic hack. But “using this method, memecoin creators were able to promote their own pump and dump schemes.”

Crypto and the new Trump presidency have become inextricably linked, especially given Elon Musk’s controversial role and DOGE’s cameo role. The hacked tweets, Binder says, “were originally published before Dogecoin, the first ever memecoin was even created.” And on that note we come full circle.