Ahead of US President Donald Trump’s Gulf visit next week, his son Eric was promoting his cryptocurrency firm in Dubai, while Don Jnr prepared to talk about “Monetising Maga” in Doha.

Last month, the Trump Organization struck its first luxury real estate deal in Qatar, and released details of a billion-dollar skyscraper in Dubai whose flats can be bought in cryptocurrency.

In a monarchical region awash with petrodollars, the list of Trump-related ventures is long and growing. However, the presidential entourage is not the only party cashing in, analysts said.

“Gulf governments likely see the presence of the Trump brand in their countries as a way to generate goodwill with the new administration,” said Robert Mogielnicki of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

If the president chose, he could hopscotch the region from one Trump venture to another when he visits Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates next week on the first foreign tour of his second term.

From Dubai’s Trump International golf course, to a high-rise residential block in Jeddah and a US$4 billion golf and real estate project on Omani state-owned land, business links are not hard to find in the desert autocracies.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas seized back money siphoned from a cryptocurrency business that had been diverted from a Kansan in an apparent email scam, court records say.

A special investigator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Kansas City Division wrote in an affidavit that a Kansas-based employee of Bizantine Capital Multistrategy Fund, a crypto-based investment company, was deceived into sending $1.2 million worth of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ether.  

The affidavit alleges that then-Leawood resident March Zheng, who worked remotely for Bizantine, received an email that appeared to be from a known customer but was later discovered to be a slightly altered email address being used by a third party.

Zheng traded the cryptocurrencies for “stable coins,” crypto that matches the value of the U.S. dollar, and deposited them into a digital wallet. But when confirming the transfer to the actual client, Zheng learned that the wallet belonged to someone else, the affidavit says.

The FBI traced the transaction through public blockchains, online ledgers that record cryptocurrency transactions, and requests for information from cryptocurrency businesses to locate the funds.

The cryptocurrencies were transferred to at least three different digital wallets and exchanged between several different cryptocurrencies, the affidavit says.

The FBI sent a seizure warrant to the company maintaining the final destination of funds, Tether, which froze the assets and allowed the transfer of just over $1 million to a government-controlled wallet.

There are still missing funds, and the FBI said they suspect the contents of three other cryptocurrency wallets contain fraudulently obtained property and are also subject to seizure.

Cryptocurrencies have been difficult to wrangle back in the past, due to the decentralized, unregulated and multinational nature of the crypto trading. But law enforcement has been getting more adept at countering crypto scams.

Last September, the Kansas Attorney General’s Office recovered money from a Nigerian crypto scammer, calling it “one of the state’s first successful civil actions against an international internet scammer.”

What We Thought of Coinbase Global’s Earnings

Coinbase Global COIN reported sequentially weaker first-quarter earnings as falling cryptocurrency prices during the quarter led to less trading and cryptocurrency asset losses. Net revenue decreased 11% from last quarter, though rose 24% from last year, to $1.96 billion.

Why it matters: While Coinbase’s first-quarter revenue was solid, its net income fell to $65.6 million, or $526.6 million adjusted for cryptocurrency investment losses, from $1.18 billion last year.

• We generally dislike Coinbase’s choice to hold material cryptocurrency investments, as the firm is already heavily exposed to cryptocurrency valuations through its custody, staking, and trading businesses.

• Falling cryptocurrency prices in the first quarter were a headwind to the firm’s trading volume, which was the primary culprit behind the sequential decrease in revenue. Total trading volume decreased 10.5%, driving total transaction revenue down 18.9% to $1.26 billion.

The bottom line: We will maintain our $170 fair value estimate for no-moat-rated Coinbase. We see the shares as modestly overvalued following their strong recovery from April lows.

• Cryptocurrency prices are inherently volatile, which contributes considerable volatility to Coinbase’s quarterly results. That said, the firm has had considerable success in growing its stablecoin revenue, which rose more than 50% from last year, mitigating some of this cryptocurrency price exposure.

Coming up: Earlier in the day Coinbase announced that it intends to buy Deribit, a cryptocurrency derivative exchange, for $700 million in cash and 11 million shares, or roughly $2.9 billion in combined value.

• The deal will bolster Coinbase’s international expansion efforts and its exposure to cryptocurrency derivative markets, in which the firm has only recently established a presence. With nearly $10 billion in cash and stablecoin assets, the acquisition is well within Coinbase’s means.

The author or authors do not own shares in any securities mentioned in this article. Find out about Morningstar’s editorial policies.