Last week, influencer Haliey Welch, who rose to fame as the “Hawk Tuah” girl from a viral TikTok video earlier this year, launched an altcoin — which allegedly rugpulled countless fans.
Welch and her team vehemently denied any wrongdoing with their HAWK token — despite the receipts being published on the token’s public blockchain for all to see.
YouTuber and online scam hunter extraordinaire Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen issued a takedown of Welch’s dubious scheme in a video last week, alleging that the scam was even worse than initially thought, with organizers absorbing millions of dollars in arbitrary fees on top of the money raised from dumping massively inflated tokens.
Findeisen even attended a Spaces call hosted on X-formerly-Twitter last week to push for some much-needed answers.
“This is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said during the call, accusing the team of brazenly exploiting “normies” who are not clued into the shady world of crypto scams.
Meanwhile, Welch, who also attended the Spaces, appeared uninterested in the conversation, abruptly interrupting crypto bro and entrepreneur Nick O’Neal as he expressed his own doubts about the whole thing.
“I hate to interrupt you Nick, but anywho, I’m going to go to bed and I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” a clearly bored Welch said, while putting on a bizarre, childish voice.
“I guess we’re talking over here,” a completely baffled O’Neal replied, laughing.
“That’s just wild,” Findeisen later reacted in his video, pointing out how ludicrous it is to “hit the bed” while “being asked questions about a scam.”
“These people are not serious, or at least it doesn’t appear that they’re taking it very seriously,” he said.
Even after Findeisen confronted Welch and her team during the Spaces call, calling them out for reserving a whopping 17 percent of tokens from day one to send to insiders, organizers had little in terms of a defense.
“This is the worst tokenomics I’ve ever seen and it is a scam,” Findeisen said during the call. “That’s my opinion, you can say whatever you want about it, you can cry defamation, that’s my opinion. It’s a scam, and I only do this for a living.”
“So who pays you Coffeezilla,” one of the organizers said, in an apparent attempt at a rebuttal.
“Ooooh, ‘turn it around, turn it around,'” Findeisen snapped back sarcastically. “Nobody’s here for me, everyone’s here for you. Where did the money for the pre-sale tokens go?”
In just 90 minutes, one wallet grabbed a stunning 17.5 percent of the supply and flipped it for a cool $1.3 million, as Cointelegraph reported.
According to Findeisen, the HAWK team made well over $1 million simply by charging sky-high fees, while Welch got away with being paid $125,000 to promote the coin, her lawyer told him.
“The team presold a few million to ‘strategic advisors’ who sold early,” he tweeted in a follow-up the day after publishing his video.
“Where the profits from fees and presale goes is currently unknown,” he added.
Welch and her team have yet to face any lawsuits over the mess. The crypto industry also happens to operate in a legal vacuum, allowing scammers to get away with a lot. In other words, it’s far from guaranteed that Welch will have to stand up for her actions in court, as many netizens have since suggested.
“If you lost money on HAWK, contact our firm to learn about your legal rights,” digital consumer protection lawfirm Burwick Law tweeted shortly after news emerged of the rug pull. “Our firm represents thousands of NFT and token investors in securities matters.”
More on the scheme: The Hawk Tuah Girl Committed a Horrible Crime