Hawk Tuah girl Hailey Welch is facing a massive backlash as investors are taking legal action against her after his $Hawk memecoin crashed just after the launch wiping off nearly half of billion dollars of investor money. Her fans said it was a textbook instance of the pump and dump scheme where her team bought tokens, created a buying frenzy because she has a huge fan base because of her viral ‘hawk Tuah’ comment, and then sold the tokens.
$HAWK was launched in the blockchain platform Solana. The value of the coin exploded by 900 per cent in initial trading Wednesday bringing the market capitalization of $HAWKto nearly half a billion dollars. Then the price collapsed by 95 per cent.
According to the blockchain data analyst Bubblemaps, 96 percent of $HAWK was concentrated in one cluster of related wallets as of Wednesday afternoon, indicating a high degree of coordination in these transactions.
Welch denied any wrongdoing and she and her team even appeared in an audio event on X Spaces. But they were cornered by several investors who called out the scam and said they will file suits against Hailey Welch for scamming her fans. Many YouTubers explained how the Hawk Tuah girl actually scammed her fans who are new to crypto. Hailey Welch’s attorney said she didn’t intend to fleece fans.
Crypto investigator Stephen Findeisen revealed that Hailey Welch was paid $125,000 advance for marketing the token from an unspecified company, and was to receive 50 per cent of net proceeds from that company after third-party expenses and costs for the development and launch had been covered.
“This is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Findeisen, who runs the popular Coffeezilla YouTube channel. “They sold 17% of tokens to insiders who had no lock-up period, while only releasing 3% to the public for trading.”