Cryptovest Exclusive: Did James Altucher Impersonate Ben Shapiro to Spam His Crypto Seminars?

Through Agora Financial, James Altucher might be using shady marketing tactics to get the word out on his products after major advertising platforms banned cryptocurrency-related ads like his.

It started on the morning of April 27, when I got an email that purported to be from Ben Shapiro—one of the most successful conservative podcasters—inviting me to view a video about some entrepreneur who said I can make a fortune off of cryptocurrencies.

There was something very “off” about this email, especially because this is far from the tone Ben Shapiro typically uses—even when he markets things—and the man doesn’t endorse cryptocurrencies in this fashion.

Either something happened and Shapiro had started peddling so-called entrepreneurial material from “to the moon in my lambo” enthusiasts, or someone is using his name and reach to sell something. I had to investigate this.

The first step to look at was the email header:

According to this, the email was sent from IP 63.143.57.178, an address in Dallas, Texas. The Daily Wire host neither lives in Dallas nor did he have any appearances in that area the moment the email was sent. Of course, this could have been sent by an intermediary using his own address.

Unsatisfied with simply finding out where the email was sent from, I had a look at “benshapiroreport.com”. The website looks semi-legitimate, but the WHOIS information and its IP address reveal something peculiar.

Apparently, the site is hosted on GoDaddy, the domain name was registered on June 10, 2016 and details about the company are masked.That’s normal. But when I looked at the IP address, something different came up.

However, “benshapiroreport.com” was run on IP address 188.130.131.189 the morning I started looking through the mystery behind this email. That is an IP in Moscow, Russia, served by the NetArt Group ISP.

The IP changed some 3 hours later to 184.168.221.26, an IP address belonging to GoDaddy in Arizona.

This change of IP might have happened because the domain owner did not want people to discover the true location of the domain.

All of the information here leads to one of three possibilities:

• Shapiro owns benshapiroreport.com and suddenly decided to break character and send this email: The possibility that Shapiro has chosen to deviate from his usual stance.
• Shapiro owns the website and was compromised for long enough for hackers to send this information: An intrusion might have allowed unauthorized use of his platform.
• Someone is impersonating Shapiro and sending dubious material through an email that looks like his, tied to a non-functioning website whose copyright on the bottom was last updated in 2016: This impersonation scenario appears most plausible.
• Shapiro owns the website and email address and someone spoofed it successfully in a way that bypasses any of the safeguards Gmail has, making me end up with this in my inbox: A technical breach in email spoofing may be at play.

Considering that he wasn’t in Dallas when the email was sent from there, the domain “benshapiroreport.com” shortly had an IP address in Moscow, and there’s no evidence of him promoting the website extensively like he does The Daily Wire and his podcast, we can safely arrive at the conclusion that one of the latter three possibilities are more likely.

When I sent an email to “[email protected],” I got an “Address not found” notice from my service’s mail delivery system as a reply. This means that the message was sent using a web mailer script, which makes such an address easier to spoof.

Looking At The Video

The one thing that made me highly suspicious of the email was the video it linked to. It says that people can invest $100 in Bitcoin today and eventually end up with a retirement fund because Amazon might accept it someday.

The video appears to be dictated by James Altucher, an entrepreneur who aggressively markets his books. The warning appears to be tailor-made for the date in which I received this email, which was April 26. Looking through the video, I could hear “April 27, 2018” pasted into the audio poorly every time he mentioned the date when the so-called opportunity would go away.