Made In Macedonia: Americans Lose Millions Buying Fake Donald Trump Debit Cards [View all]
BELGRADE -- Last September, 86-year-old Ann Bratton thought she'd stumbled onto the investment of a lifetime.
An ad on one of the encrypted Telegram app channels the Nashville-area retiree had joined was offering debit-like "Trump cards" featuring the billionaire U.S. ex-president's image, each supposedly preloaded with $200,000. After years of forking out tens of thousands of dollars on souvenir banknotes, coins, and other Trump memorabilia, she calculated that she could quickly and easily turn a $6,000 investment into a $4 million nest egg.
What she didn't know was that behind the offer of "Trump Collection" cards was an opaque group of web-based vendors from a faded industrial city 8,500 kilometers away. And that city, in the Balkan country of North Macedonia, was already notorious for being home to legions of scammers who had fraudulently monetized Donald Trump's popularity in the United States and around the world.
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But it's an open secret in this corner of the Balkans that a startlingly successful digital disinformation and fake news industry that emerged in the Macedonian city of Veles alongside the political rise of Donald Trump helped lay the groundwork for a thriving new business in fraudulent goods marketed through encrypted channels to Trump-style conservatives and "patriots" an ocean away.
https://www.rferl.org/a/macedonia-trump-debit-cards-scam/32836128.html
**** as a note: If you read the article, you will see just how big a fool Bratton is (when she describes Trump in paragraph 7)
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