Some of the world’s savviest business leaders have been duped by enterprising fraudsters leveraging their desperate desire for facetime with President Donald Trump.
Scammers appear to have been hard at work hawking bogus access to U.S.-hosted panels and other events at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, per a notice on the organizers’ website.
“Caveat Billionaires, it has been brought to our attention that again this year external parties are selling ‘VIP access to USA House’ and other Stromback Global venues in Davos,” the notice reads.
“For the avoidance of doubt, USA House and Stromback Global, do not work with any external resellers and we will not give access to people who purchased such packages,” it goes on. “Volume of inbound queries this year suggests that these fake VIP passes may be the fastest selling fiction about Davos since Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.”
The notice concludes: “Our sympathies to those who fell victim to these scams.”
USA House, the hub used by the official U.S. delegation to Davos, does not publish listings of specific access package prices on its site.
VIP receptions and other exclusive events are ordinarily reserved for invited guests and sponsors—like tech giant Microsoft, management consultancy McKinsey, and crypto firm Ripple–who are reported to have kicked in up to $1 million each to support the event space’s programming.
Trump’s forthcoming attendance at the forum, a prominent symbolic arena for global economic cooperation, comes amid what critics have described as the MAGA administration’s all-out assault on the rules-based international order.
Only this past weekend, the U.S. president threatened a trade war with European allies over his efforts to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
He has meanwhile invited despots like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to join his “Board of Peace,” likened by detractors to a MAGAfied version of the United Nations.
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