On August 5, a Twitter account with 146,000 followers, belonging to somebody named Nicole Mincey, posted this message: “Trump working hard for the American people…..thanks❤????????” Trump gave it his official stamp of approval: a retweet. “Thank you Nicole!” he added. Trump’s retweet got 49,000 likes and 10,000 retweets of its own.

Trump was had. There is no Nicole Mincey, and Twitter suspended that account a day later.

“Nicole Mincey was a fake character,” a woman calling herself Lorraine Elijah, believed to have run the Twitter account and a web site associated with it, told Yahoo Finance in an email. “We obviously went to [sic] far. I joined twitter to make money and now this is a nightmare gone wrong.”

Trump’s retweet of ProTrump45 More

Further investigation reveals that “Nicole Mincey” is a fabricated Internet persona based loosely on a real person who was most likely recruited by scammers through social media. But rather than some sophisticated operation run by a foreign intelligence service, as the imagination might suggest, Nicole Mincey appears to be the creation of a couple of hucksters with a more mundane plan in mind: simply selling some hats and T-shirts.

Anybody with a social-media account or email address knows the Internet has a bottomless dark side filled with scams, phonies and worse. “Nicole Mincey” is now part of that sinister funhouse.

Yahoo Finance cannot fully document who created her. But we are confident there is no such person, and that her creator duped gullible consumers, a few mainstream media organizations and even the president himself into trusting that she was real. In this context, President Trump’s reliance on Twitter and his continual complaints about “fake news” have new significance that redound on Trump himself.

Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Encrypted communication available.

Yahoo Finance became interested in Nicole Mincey in mid-July, because of several irregularities on a Web site she supposedly founded, www.ProTrump45.com. The Web site’s “About” section, for instance, was filled with typos and grammatical errors. Repeated calls to the 800 number never went through. And the Twitter account associated with the site — now suspended — had several hallmarks of a fake “bot” account, such as an inordinate number of followers. Some of those followers had profile pictures that showed up on other social media accounts with totally different names — a classic sign of fakery.

One of several photos that accompanied the Twitter account of the fake persona “Nicole Mincey.” More

Yahoo Finance ordered a flag from ProTrump45.com to see if it would arrive as promised in 7 to 10 days. The site took our money, through a PayPal account — $30 for the flag, $15 for shipping and $2.40 for tax, for a total of $47.40. But no flag ever arrived. We did get a notice, however, saying, “Your order is on its way,” along with a UPS tracking number. When we contacted UPS, a spokesman told us the tracking number was bogus and the order had been “stopped as fraud.” We did a “who is” search looking up registration details for the Web site and found it had been registered anonymously through a Florida company called Perfect Privacy, essentially masking the site’s real owners.

“We came up with this idea to make some money.”

The emailed order confirmation from ProTrump45 did contain one curious clue, however: an email address that belonged to a student at St. Peter’s University, a small Jesuit school in Jersey City, N.J. An August 5 story on heavy.com, which first raised questions about whether Nicole Mincey was a real person, said the student had been a victim of identity theft who planned to file a police report. But in a phone conversation with Yahoo Finance, the student told us she had been involved with ProTrump45 web site as a blogger and had been recruited to the effort by two people, “Lorraine Elijah” and “Dr. William Byrd,” who followed her on Instagram and invited her to join the Web operation sometime this past spring.

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