Bill Pulte, the embattled head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), once promoted a dubious memecoin created by a social media influencer facing fraud charges. The previously unreported episode raises additional questions about the 37-year-old construction heir, who over the past few months has lobbed allegations of mortgage fraud against President Donald Trump’s political foes, fired ethics staff who questioned his actions, and become the subject of an investigation by the Government Accountability Office.
The memecoin at issue, $ZACK, was backed by a man who goes by the X handle @MrZackMorris, after the popular main character of the 1990s TV show Saved by the Bell. His real name is Edward Constantinescu, and along with seven other defendants, he was accused in 2022 by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors of at least $114 million through a form of stock manipulation known as a pump-and-dump scheme, in which a person spreads misleading positive information about a stock to raise its price, only to then sell off their own holdings at a profit—often leading to the collapse of the share price and financial pain for the remaining investors. A year and a half after this case began, Pulte took to Twitter to announce that he was investing in $ZACK—even as Constantinescu’s dogged online promotion of the coin closely resembled the relentless stock hyping that had gotten him into legal trouble in the first place.
Pulte’s involvement with a memecoin backed by a recently indicted scammer is particularly notable given his role as the head regulator of two publicly traded entities key to the US economy, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (At the time Pulte tweeted about investing, Constantinescu’s charges had been dismissed; the court ruled that depriving people of crucial information didn’t count as fraud. Appeals court judges later disagreed and ruled that the charges against him could proceed. They were reopened in October.) That $ZACK has some of the hallmarks of a pump-and-dump scheme itself is even more troubling.
After Mother Jones reached out to Pulte for comment, his attorneys responded. They did not confirm whether Pulte invested in $ZACK, as he claimed on X. They told Mother Jones that he does not currently own the coin and did not profit from $ZACK. They also added that under Pulte’s leadership, “Fannie and Freddie continue to have stronger governance today than at any time in their long history.” Last month, court filings noted that Fannie Mae’s internal ethics watchdog opened an investigation into how Pulte has been able to access confidential mortgage information about some of Trump’s political foes that he’s publicized on social media; a dozen people who touched the investigation were subsequently fired.
“The only people who make money are the people who usually get in before the coin is even launched.”
Constantinescu did not respond to a request for comment. Efforts to contact him through his former attorneys were unsuccessful, and he has not notified the court of his current representation.
Experts say that whether Constantinescu’s memecoin was a pump-and-dump scheme, a seasoned investor like Pulte should have stayed away from it in the first place.
“Memecoins are a red flag,” says Fred Morstatter, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California who conducted research on crypto pump-and-dump schemes. “Getting involved in that space is not the best sign of sound financial judgment.”
Poppy Alexander, an attorney who specializes in matters that involve cutting-edge financial frauds, including those involving cryptocurrency, said that niche memecoins are almost always pump-and-dump schemes: “The only people who make money are the people who usually get in before the coin is even launched.” A report from crypto-tracking company Solidus Labs published this year echoes this assessment: It found that 98.6 percent of the memecoins launched on the exchange where $ZACK was started were pump-and-dump schemes.
The charges against Constantinescu claimed that, along with several other influencers in the world of “FinTwit” (Financial Twitter), he had orchestrated pump-and-dump schemes that won him immense wealth, at the expense of his hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
Constantinescu and his co-defendants, the SEC wrote, “promoted themselves as trustworthy stock-picking gurus. In reality, they are seasoned stock manipulators.”
Prosecutors argued that after buying stocks on the cheap, Constantinescu hyped them to his hundreds of thousands of followers on X and Discord with misleading information. Then, once he’d worked to inflate the price, he sold off his own holdings at massive profit, tanking the stock and leaving the investors he’d urged to buy with losses. Sometimes this bait-and-switch happened across a matter of minutes: Constantinescu and his co-conspirators would flood their followers with passionate, public plans to buy and hold a promising stock, but in quiet, they would dump their holdings within hours of their pronouncements. “The defendants sell their shares into the demand that their deceptive promotions generate,” wrote the SEC in its indictment. Constantinescu and his co-defendants, the SEC wrote, “promoted themselves as trustworthy stock-picking gurus. In reality, they are seasoned stock manipulators.”
Constantinescu flaunted the spoils of his work online: He posted photos of his new red Ferrari, his designer watches, and his enormous trading gains. In private, he and his collaborators bragged about making money on the backs of the investors they were tricking: “We’re robbing fucking idiots of their money,” one of them said in a recorded conversation referenced by prosecutors. In May 2024, eight weeks after some of his charges were dismissed, Constantinescu was back on X as @MrZackMorris, hyping the new crypto coin $ZACK.
$ZACK quickly exploded in value as Constantinescu touted it to his followers in hundreds of posts on X. “Let’s make life changing money,” he wrote. “I think it’s going to pay us more than we imagined. Buy and hold.”
But just a few days in, crypto researchers noticed that the vast majority of the wallets buying $ZACK seemed to belong to the developers of the coin. The revelation caused investors to lose faith, and the coin’s value began to plummet. Some followers pondered if Constantinescu might be trying to pull a fast one. “Zack Morris evades conviction on SEC pump and dump charges, he then proceeds to rug his 500k followers on his $ZACK token,” one user wrote on X. “Can’t make this shit up.”
Constantinescu celebrated on X, promoting Pulte’s backing of the memecoin as yet more proof that it is a worthwhile investment. “His decision to join our ranks is a testament to the strength and potential of our project,” he wrote.
With his coin struggling, Constantinescu publicly asked Pulte for help. Pulte had become a FinTwit influencer with millions of followers by both giving away money to strangers and also talking about viral memestocks, including Bed Bath & Beyond. So Constantinescu recorded a message asking Pulte to talk about his coin, too, and posted it on X. “Mr. Pulte, I just want you to know my story,” he opened. He went on to explain that he was born in Romania, came to the United States in the early 1990s, and lived in Queens and Philadelphia with little money while his dad drove a cab. He said he’d always been a hustler—that he sold shoes, then phones, then homes before turning to stocks. Then he revealed the charges against him—the DOJ and SEC, he said, tried to destroy his life. This new coin was his chance at redemption. He asked Pulte to join the $ZACK community. Two days later, he posted another voice note to Pulte on X. “Buckle up, we’re gonna go to the moon,” he said, using a common FinTwit phrase that signals a stock is likely to explode in value.
The next day, Pulte tweeted: “I bought some $ZACK.” Constantinescu celebrated on X, promoting Pulte’s backing of the memecoin as yet more proof that it was a worthwhile investment. “His decision to join our ranks is a testament to the strength and potential of our project,” he wrote. “As we welcome Mr. @pulte into the $ZACK family, we’re confident that his involvement will propel us to new heights.” The coin’s price immediately rose.
One X user called Pulte “the spiritual vice president” of $ZACK, and soon other users thanked him for holding his $ZACK and “believing in us.”
Several days later, $ZACK’s price began to falter again—going from about 5 cents to almost half of that within a week. On social media, Constantinescu and his followers upped the ante, tagging Pulte in dozens of tweets about the coin. One X user called Pulte “the spiritual vice president” of $ZACK, and soon other users thanked him for holding his $ZACK and “believing in us.” About two weeks later, Pulte tweeted that he had bought even more $ZACK that day, even as the price had sunk. The implication was that he was a believer. Again, the price went up.
It is unclear how much, if any, money Pulte invested in $ZACK, and it is difficult to get the full picture of how he talked about the coin online: He deleted more than 24,000 tweets ahead of his nomination to lead the FHFA. But social media activity around the coin in the spring and summer of 2024 exhibits some characteristics experts say are common in pump-and-dump schemes.
Morstatter said that crypto pump-and-dump schemes often follow a pattern: Influencers target smaller or less known coins because their prices are easier to influence. Then they use their own accounts to generate enthusiasm about the coin with frequent and positive posts. That’s what Constantinescu seems to have done with $ZACK, he says. Multiple reports from crypto researchers have outlined similar trends when it comes to memecoins.
Alexander outlined a similar pattern: Influencers announce the coin after “having already secured a significant number of those coins for themselves and their friends…And then they say this thing’s going to the moon.” Not long after, they seek someone outside their circle—“who looks like an outside, independent third party”—to say the same thing.
Lawyers have told the court that Constantinescu has begun to threaten the case’s prosecutors, calling them from multiple phone numbers in the middle of the night and offering to pay his X followers thousands of dollars for compromising information on the prosecutors.
For Constantinescu, Pulte was that third party. Some users on X and Reddit noted his participation and seemed to take it as a sign that the coin was worth buying. And while his announcements were often followed by bumps in price, none of them ever reached the peaks that the coin saw in its initial days. “It looks like the Pulte thing was the last breath of this being successful,” Morstatter says. Which means that it’s unlikely Pulte could have made a lot on any investment he might have made—and other investors in the coin almost certainly lost money. The coin never recovered, and as of today $ZACK’s value has fallen by 99 percent from its peak.
Meanwhile, $ZACK’s founder Constantinescu has recently found himself facing more legal scrutiny. According to a sealed motion filed in court that Constantinescu posted to X and was reported on by the Houston Chronicle, lawyers have told the court that Constantinescu has begun to threaten the case’s prosecutors, calling them from multiple phone numbers in the middle of the night, offering to pay his X followers thousands of dollars for compromising information on the prosecutors, and even threatening the lawyers and their children—saying he would “choose violence” and “destroy” them.
In recent months, Pulte unexpectedly has become one of the Trump administration’s lightning rods. It started when he anointed himself as something of a mortgage fraud expert, currying favor with Trump by digging up old documents and using them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to California Sen. Adam Schiff and Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes to his large following on X, before referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. Those accusations haven’t turned into charges, but they kicked off internal ethics probes at Fannie Mae and the FHFA about how he’s accessing private mortgage data to make his claims. Last month, court filings noted that more than a dozen ethics staffers working on these investigations were fired.
Not long after, Trump tasked Pulte with coming up with ways to tackle America’s housing shortage. In response, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for a 50-year mortgage, on a 3-foot-by-5-foot poster board that laid out the plan in graphics and captions and claimed it would put Trump among the “Great American Presidents,” according to Politico. Trump wrote about the idea on social media 10 minutes after Pulte’s presentation, only to have it be panned by experts on the left and right. This month, the GAO announced that it has opened an investigation into Pulte, following a request by several senators.
Amid all this controversy, Pulte’s influence on key elements of the housing finance system has grown. He has been in close touch with the Trump administration as it debates the sale of additional stock in the mortgage giants that Pulte’s agency oversees—a move that could have major economic and housing impacts, depending on how it is structured. And, of course, Pulte has been opining about all of this online to his 3 million followers: Following a critical tweet he sent about Freddie Mac earlier this month, shares of the company declined by 10 percent within a week.
