Hey, Haliey Welch, better known as Hawk Tuah Girl, decided to cash in on cryptocurrency too. On December 4th, she launched her own memecoin $HAWK. And it turned out to be a really bad move, which might land her in court.
Welch, who was just a factory worker making minimum wage at the start of 2024, became an internet sensation. After a viral video, Hawk Tuah Girl set up social media accounts, founded a company where she registered various trademarks, got representation through an agent, and started selling merch. On August 15, 2024, she threw the ceremonial first pitch at a New York Mets baseball game, launched the Talk Tuah podcast under the media company Betr, co-founded by Jake Paul. Later, the meme-star released a dating advice app called Pookie Tools.
Some media estimated Haliey Welch’s wealth to be between $200-$500k, others at a whopping $12.5 million. That wasn’t enough, and she decided to monetize her popularity through cryptocurrency, considering that memecoins are at the peak of popularity. In an interview with Fortune before the launch, Welch insisted that $HAWK was not just a way to scam money. However, less than 24 hours later, at least one investor had already filed a complaint about the memecoin with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The $HAWK token? launched on the Solana blockchain on the evening of December 4th at a price of $0.005492, quickly soared by 900%, reaching a market cap of $490 million. However, a few hours later, the cap plummeted to $60 million, a drop of 91%.
Many investors lost huge amounts of money. Accusations of fraud flew at Welch, typical of a “rug pull” scheme, where project creators initially create hype and then sell off their tokens, leaving other investors with devalued assets. One of the angry investors turned out to be a user who lost $35,000.
Hi @HalieyWelchX My $35,000 that I purchased of $Hawk is now $2,000 after 10 minutes of buying.
I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah but you took my life savings.
I purchased your coin $Hawk that you were so excited about with my life savings and children’s college education fund as… pic.twitter.com/MRftQ2sT6g
— JIGGA.5mbK (@jiggadrin_) December 4, 2024
Welch denies the accusations. On X, she noted that the project team did not sell any tokens. Moreover, she said, high fees were set to prevent “snipers”—traders who quickly buy up assets in the first few seconds of launch. However, these actions didn’t convince skeptics. One wallet managed to buy 17.5% of the memecoin’s supply for $993k at the time and sold it for a profit of $1.3 million within less than two hours.
We previously wrote about how to properly study crypto projects and what to look out for to avoid being scammed.
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