Man charged with using fake Trump family accounts to dupe followers out of thousands

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A man is facing criminal charges for allegedly impersonating members of Donald Trump’s family in an online scheme that led hundreds of people to donate thousands of dollars to what prosecutors have called a phoney political organisation.

Joshua Hall, a 22-year-old man from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, is accused of raising thousands of dollars via accounts in the name of the president’s brother, Robert, and his youngest son, Barron.

The accounts posted messages calling for donations via a crowdfunding website, and directed users to follow Mr Hall’s own bona fide account, from which he solicited donations.

According to a court filing in the Southern District of New York, the FBI found that Mr Hall “used those accounts to amass more than 100,000 followers on social media and obtain media coverage, a public platform he then exploited to confer on himself and the Fictitious Political Organisation a false imprimatur of close ties with the president’s family and to encourage victims to make monetary contributions to the Fictitious Political Organisation”.

In total, the FBI claims, the scheme “yielded thousands of dollars from hundreds of victims located throughout the United States”.

As the FBI tells it, Mr Hall created his account in the name of the president’s brother in July 2020, and posted from it until Robert Trump died a month later. It was then that he allegedly created the account in the name of Barron Trump – then 14 years old – which posted messages calling Mr Hall a “friend and partner”.

“Josh is an amazing patriot who is doing tremendous things for our great country,” the FBI quotes from one message. “He has my COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!”

According to the court filing, Robert and Barron Trump were not the only people Mr Hall impersonated. The FBI claims he “created several social media accounts bearing the names and photographs of other persons, which he used to impersonate those individuals in public posts and private messages”.

It was in around December 2020 that the crowdfunding site contacted him and “repeatedly requested documentation showing how Hall used the funds” he had raised for his non-existent entity. He provided nothing, and his account with the site was closed.

Outside of the latest court filing, federal prosecutors have previously accused Mr Hall of creating an account in the name of the 45th president’s sister, Elizabeth Trump Grau, in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

That account tweeted that “This election inspired me to break my silence. My brother Don won this election.” The president himself retweeted the message before the account was exposed as a fraud.

With Associated Press