A 2011 post from President Donald Trump on X now includes a fake nude photo of him—thanks to a bug discovered by scammers.
The post, which originally included a link to YouTube, now redirects to a cryptocurrency website offering a meme coin known as “Trump’s Meat.”
The bug, first reported by journalist Matt Binder, involves the URL-shortening service Bitly, a platform that allows users to simplify complex hyperlinks.
In Trump’s example, the long URL for his YouTube video discussing an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity and his appearance at a Tea Party rally was shortened to “bit.ly/gnMeEl.”
The bug allowed the cryptocurrency scammers to repurpose the old and inactive link used by Trump. This caused Trump’s post on X to refresh with a new link preview for the website pump.fun.
The link preview now includes an image of a Trump impersonator receiving a spray tan while naked. The photograph was originally captured in 2016 by British artist Alison Jackson, who is known for taking controversial portraits of celebrity lookalikes.
Pump.fun is often used by scammers to create cryptocurrency tokens for pump and dump schemes, which see regular buyers lose money after the creators sell off their stockpiles of coins.
The hijacking of Trump’s hyperlinks comes after the president released a meme coin that was widely derided as an unethical money grab.
But it wasn’t just the 2011 tweet that was compromised. A Bitly link used in a 2013 tweet in which Trump called on his supporters to follow him on Instagram also redirected to pump.fun.
The same trick was used on a post from First Lady Melania Trump in 2013. A tweet that linked to a news article about her jewelry line now goes to another meme coin bearing her name.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Bitly announced that it had fixed the bug and was working on removing users attempting to redirect others to meme coins.
“Our engineering team implemented a code fix that has solved the issue and Trust and Safety is continuing to remove accounts that misused Bitly in order to draw people to crypto meme sites,” the post said.
Yet even with the fix, the graphic image on Trump’s post remains.
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