Central African Republic's Presidential Memecoin Triggers Deepfake Doubts and a Wave of Copycat Scams

A political meme coin trend that began weeks earlier with Donald Trump's own token launch reached an unusual new milestone when the presidential office of the Central African Republic appeared to launch its own coin.

The verified account of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra announced the token, which briefly reached a market capitalization of almost $1 billion — equivalent to roughly a third of the country's GDP.

The announcement landed on February 9th, as much of the US audience was watching the Super Bowl. Touadéra's account introduced $CAR, calling it "an experiment designed to show how something as simple as a meme can unite people, support national development, and put the Central African Republic on the world stage in a unique way."

Several details drew immediate suspicion. The tweet was posted near midnight local time and written in English, notable given that Touadéra's account had tweeted almost exclusively in French for the prior three years. A follow-up video then showed the president himself, speaking French, endorsing the token.

Launched via the Solana-based platform Pump.fun, $CAR's price action dwarfed even Trump's earlier meme token, climbing from nothing to roughly $900 million in market capitalization.

Pump, then dump

The rise proved as short-lived as it was dramatic. Growing skepticism, fueled by AI tools flagging the announcement video as likely synthetic, sent $CAR's valuation tumbling. Official-looking tweets about the project kept appearing even as the original car.meme website went offline and the associated social account was temporarily suspended.

Within 11 hours of its peak, the token had fallen 87% to a $125 million market cap. A subsequent tweet from the presidential account declaring "success" briefly reversed the slide, driving a 196% rally to $375 million within roughly half an hour. Momentum built further when the account announced a first "development" use of proceeds — $50,000 worth of tokens earmarked for repairing a high school — which again pushed the price up.

The project's apparent recovery included a restored X account, a newly launched website, and a fresh presidential video that, unlike the first, passed scrutiny from the deepfake-detection service Deepware.

Deepfake doubts

Two independent AI models had raised concerns about the authenticity of the original presidential video. Deepware's own tool produced a split verdict: one model flagged the clip as suspicious, and another put the probability of AI generation at 82%, while two additional models found no signs of manipulation.

Doubts weren't confined to the video. The token's official X account was suspended and later reinstated, and Namecheap, the registrar behind car.meme, pulled the domain over "abusive services" — undercutting confidence that the project's stated "national development" goal was being funded as claimed.

Tracking the token flows

According to the project's published tokenomics, supply was allocated as follows: 35% for country development, 25% for "creators and company," 20.7% for liquidity, 10% for charity, and 9.3% for public distribution.

On-chain analysis from Bubblemaps reported that actual holdings broadly matched the published breakdown, though matching the stated allocation is not proof of legitimate use of funds, and the promised 20% liquidity allocation had yet to materialize. Separately, researchers identified wallets holding 33.31% and 25% of the supply respectively — figures that align closely with the announced development and creator allocations.

Imitators pile in

The day after $CAR's peak, an account impersonating the president of the Republic of Congo announced a copycat launch, pitching a token described as "aimed at supporting and advancing the prosperity of our great nation." The scam was executed sloppily — the account mislabeled its own ticker as $CONQO rather than $CONGO on Twitter — but that didn't stop a roughly $2 million pump-and-dump that played out over about four hours.

The same account used to run the Congo impersonation, @sadwraciborzu, was later repurposed to impersonate Nikos Christodoulides, the President of Cyprus, in order to promote a "Cyprus National Token."

Elsewhere, an Indian cabinet minister's account, which has roughly 400,000 followers, briefly began promoting a token called $INDIA before quickly being set to private. The account had in fact been compromised, though the reputational fallout had already occurred by the time that came to light.

This pattern wasn't new: weeks earlier, Cuba's official account had launched a succession of four meme coins, each of which was subsequently rugged.

Layers of unverified trust

Separate from the debate over the video's authenticity, a more straightforward scam was unfolding around $CAR. Crypto data aggregators were found hosting links to phishing sites posing as official $CAR resources. One Telegram group tied to the token, created on February 3rd and cross-posted across crypto platforms, evolved from a vague "ca soon" teaser into a phishing operation complete with fake verification bots.

A Jupiter representative posting as "meow" attempted to informally verify the token's official status while also flagging "doubts about the lock." That temporary verification, intended to help people avoid buying the wrong ticker, did little to settle the matter given the source of the warning.

By sixteen hours after launch, with substantial sums having moved through unverified wallets and the deepfake analyses still inconclusive, no confirmation had come from any Central African Republic government channel outside of the president's Twitter account. Meanwhile, Reuters reported on the president's tweets largely at face value, without raising the deepfake concerns or noting the unusual midnight, English-language tweet from an otherwise French-speaking account.

The broader context

The episode arrived as the US government was scaling back regulatory oversight and cutting foreign aid programs. One observer noted that African nations, facing the prospect of USAID funding cuts, appeared to be turning toward crypto fundraising instead. Separately, CryptoQuant's CEO had recently predicted that "PoliFi" — politically themed tokens — would become the industry's defining use case, though what played out with $CAR looked far less like structured treasury management than like an improvised, high-risk experiment.

Whether $CAR amounts to a genuine if reckless state-level experiment, a scam built on a real president's identity, or something in between remains unresolved. What is clear is that the underlying pattern — verified accounts tied to public officials launching tokens with minimal transparency, followed swiftly by copycat scams — spread to Congo, Cyprus, and India within days, echoing the earlier run of coin launches tied to Cuba's government.