Cool Media.
Hi everybody. Jamie here with just a few notes up top. Thank you so much for listening to the Hawk Tuus series. If you haven't listened to the previous parts, I would recommend you do so. I just wanted to mention, because it doesn't come up in the space of this episode, that we have done our due diligence. We reached out to Haley Welch's team, we heard back, and then we were slow ghosted to date, so now you know. Also, if you enjoy the show, you can head over to
our reddit board. Normally I wouldn't suggest going on a reddit board, but it's actually very lovely and wholesome our slash sixteenth minute.
If you have ideas for future.
Episodes you'd like to see, or if you just want to have a nice time with the nice listeners of this show. Also one more note. The documentary I'm talking about towards the beginning of this episode is by Dan Olsen. It is called Line Goes Up. It's on his YouTube channel Folding Ideas. It's fantastic.
Okay, talk to apart three Let's go.
Sixteen six sixteen.
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the Internet's characters of the day and see how their big moment affected them and what it says about us.
And the Internet and today. In a truly grand finale, we.
Are going to take a look at the scam that took down viral star Aley Welch aka Hawk to a Girl for now at least. If there's one thing I've learned in the course of making this show, it's to
never count a diva out. And for many of you, this may be a moment in Haley's online career you thought would have come much earlier in the series, her crypto scam crypto scams being something that I have postponed trying to understand for half a decade at least, But for everyone, a day does come, and so half mine and perhaps so half yours. So I guess just a disclaimer. If you do understand crypto, even in a basic way,
this part may be a little frustrating for you. But if you don't, I will walk you through this as best I can, because this is the moment that I suspect most people are going to remember about Hailey Welch. While most people didn't know much more than her original viral moment up until this time, and maybe some checked out Talk TUA. This the crypto scam became the legacy.
The Wholk two girl might be going to prison for the dumbest scam in history.
Hawk twa girl also known as Hailey Welch, launched her mean cooin hawk last week. The coin soared to a market cap around four hundred million dollars be fourteen game.
This girl just ruined her entire career and honestly.
We all saw this coming, right.
So how does this crypto launch for hawkcoin go from being Haley Doc Hollywood and the team hailing it as the biggest opportunity in years to Doc Hollywood calling everyone who had invested mentally ill in under twenty four hours. Well, first, let's set the scene a brief history of crypto alongside a recap of Haley Welch's life. Attempts at cryptocurrency were
underway years before Haley was born. The idea was first conceived in nineteen eighty three, was acknowledged by the NSA in nineteen ninety six, and systems like BitGold were bandied about before the Internet went mainstream. And finally the technology ran smoothly enough to announce formally.
Over a decade after that.
Hailey Welch was born in two thousand and two to a lower class, fractured family in Tennessee. Her earliest years were under two consecutive George W. Bush presidencies, heading into kindergarten around the time that the housing bubble in the US got really bad during the mid two thousands. Then in late two thousand and seven, the Great Recession began and it had a massive effect on Tennessee, slamming the
job market for years to come. And in a complete coincidence, I'm sure, as the public's faith in big banking understandably plummeted, the idea of cryptocurrency finally became palatable in the mainstream. In two thousand and nine. Bitcoin was launched by Satoshi Nakamoto, who Hayley Welch not for nothing, regularly parodied on X calling herself Hoktoshi to a moto. I know, really creative. Anyways, crypto continues to grow and shrink in a pretty niche
market in these early years. Silk Road is launched in twenty twelve and then is shut down by the FBI several years later. The way that the crypto blockchain works. At its simplest is that it's a decentralized activity log of financial transactions that relies on a con census mechanism among users that often ends up sowing a fundamental distrust
in understanding what these numbers on this blockchain actually mean. Basically, it requires a hell of a lot of checks and balances for users to get clear answers, and that kind of labor can be very time consuming for someone who's just an individual doing crypto in earnest alone. So most people you hear that have been very successful in crypto have a team doing this labor for them in order to maximize their own personal profit.
Crypto, as professor of.
Computer science and Economics Jen Lansky qualified, requires the following. First, its value is maintained through consensus and not a big bank central authority. Second, the system will decide when new cryptocurrency can be minted. Third, ownership can be proven only in the crypto blockchain. Fourth, crypto can be transferred, but transaction statements can only be accessed by the current owner.
And finally, if two ownership changes are requested at once on the blockchain, only one of these transactions can be acted on something that ends up screwing over a lot
of people down the line. It seems like as crypto becomes more normalized, even in niche internet communities, interest then moves to a currency called ethereum, a version of cryptocurrency that became very successful by marketing itself on the idea that crypto bypasses government corruption and doesn't just force you to sign up for a new set of unregulated corruptions.
For years, as Dan Olsen explains, there were these unbased rumors that various countries Brazil Venezuela were on the brink of switching their entire economies to cryptocurrency, but this was never really true in retrospect. In fact, it was a result of the effort of crypto boosters making it seem like the currency was far more popular abroad than it
actually was. After the Ethereum boom came the NFTs, a crypto gateway of sorts that was something of a play to get normies into crypto that seemed to work pretty well at the time for a couple minutes at least.
You probably remember this. NFTs were a craze in the early twenty twenties, which happens to be another time of incredible economic despair in which people paid for quote unquote true digital objects, which many, including me, thought meant that you were buying the copy, the definitive copy of a digital artwork. And so, in the early days of its mainstream popularity, NFTs expanded to the sale of memes. We've actually talked about it on this show before in our Overly Attached Girlfriend episode.
There was this.
Small boom where the major main characters of the two thousands and the twenty tens took the chance to monetize their image that in most cases had been involuntarily taken and co opted from them, and actually made money off of them.
For the first time.
However, as Danielson's documentary explains in great detail, NFTs ended up being a scam of their own. It was a way to imply scarcity about an infinitely reproducible image, and NFTs became synonymous with art during this boom in the early twenty twenties, first coming into the news when an artist named people Fine sold sixty nine million dollars worth of NFTs.
What's even more.
Relevant, though, is that this sale was made at legacy auction house Christie's, which gave a whiff of legitimacy to the project that na fs previously had not had by a long shot. NFT ended up being the crypto version of the speculation market or the collector's market, which always crashes. The example that comes right to mind for me is beanie babies. When they're first released, you can get them for about five to seven dollars.
Once they retire, the value goes up.
In like two years, there were like two hundred and forty five dollars.
Stuff.
Thing's worth about four thousand dollars.
But it goes far back as the tulip bulbspec bubble of the seventeenth century. We've been overvaluing things that are ultimately kind of trash.
For a long time.
NFTs were perceived as exclusive collectibles, which on most timeline spoils down to I hope you actually like them, because they almost never retain their value. Thankfully, I love my beanie babies, and I don't care that my mom sent my college fund on them. In line goes up. Jan Olsen also emphasizes that the marks and the targets for these cryptos scams aren't the fabulously wealthy that we see
in media. The marks are people somewhere in the middle class, people with some disposable income who are still long term financially insecure enough that they'd take a risk on something as tenuous as.
A crypto scam.
As Olsen puts it, the target of these scams are quote tenuously middle class, socially isolated, and highly responsive to memes. While this was happening, Haley Welch graduated high school in twenty twenty in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, beginning community college but dropping out to focus on her day job. As we've talked about before, Haley loved her home, her family, her friends, but unquestionably grew up during a time of
extreme economic and social precarity. It would probably be hard for her to remember a time before bad job markets and gun safety drills to evade mass shootings in school, when all the while, the way to quote unquote make it in America was shifting from the conventional become a star model to the Internet version of the become a star model, become a star, get your grift in, and get the fuck out of there, which brings us to
meme coins. Meme coins are a newer form of crypto that are famously unstable and scammy, and saying something is particularly scammy in the crypto world is really saying something.
Meme coins are exactly what they sound like.
There are a currency whose relevance depends on the appeal of the meme personality who is the face of them, whether that meme is a person or a fictional character or an idea. The most successful examples, and one that I think has tragically crossed into the mainstream, is the Elon Musk touted doge coin, which is based on a meme of Ashiba Nu who bless his heart, he didn't
see the storm coming. Meme coins of this nature tend to be sold as crypto on the bizarrely and I guess aptly named website pump dot fun, and the name itself is a wink at how many pump and dump schemes the space has been known for over the years. The site was started by three guys in their twenties in London, and this was a space that sort of facilitated the resurgence of crypto after NFTs sort of took a turn.
In the early twenty twenties.
The New York Times reported that in the front half of twenty twenty four, one point seven million coins launched, compared to just two hundred and fifty thousand ish in the same period of time in twenty twenty three. So if you've heard about meme coins more.
It's certainly not an accident.
And stars of the twenty twenty four space outside of Haley, whose eventual coin was called hawk Coin, were Maga coin, ear Coin after Donald Trump got shot in the ear, Baby Trump coin.
One of the coolest parts of my job being able to do this every day is seeing different projects. And I love these Trump meme coins that have come out, like Maga uh and obviously now baby Trump that's the one that I am sharing with you now. And you know what, it makes you smile what?
And there are celebrity coins. Manisphere influencer and convicted criminal Andrew Tait launched a coin called daddy Coin. Flop rapper Iggy Azilia started one called mother Coin, there was one called tom and Jelly. You name a cursed idea, someone probably tried to launch it as a meme coin last year.
So even though crypto fell out of favor in a major way in twenty twenty two, pump dot Fun and these meme coins had a big hand in bringing them back because of how easy this website made it to get a crypto coin minted for as low as two dollars, perhaps a bone chilling ai image of baby Trump and boom,
You've created the stupidest new economy on the planet. But because the barrier to entry for making meme coins is so low, this space tends to bring in new people to crypto, which, as we will learn, is kind of
the perfect setup for a rug pole. In short, a rug pole is a pretty basic crypto scam that basically consists of overhyping the eventual value of a meme coin, promising a lot, and then pulling the rug out from investors, selling off all of the valuable assets of the token well in advance, so that everyone else is more or less complex completely screwed over shortly after the token launches and the value crashes. I'll let my guests explain it better, but that's the idea.
If you're a.
Fan of a certain meme or personality, or for some reason Iggy Azalea, you could cash in on the popularity of a meme to lurein investors. The average of whom as Danielsen says, is a middle class person throwing in around three hundred and fifty dollars on average, then pulling the rug and causing them to lose it all. But here's a weird thing that was striking me the more I looked into this world. Even the most starter crypto investors seem to have a basic understanding that crypto is,
to some extent a scam for most people. The true rug pull, I think is the average investor finding out that they're not the scammer, they're the scammed. And I know that plenty of people have said that if you get scammed by like hawked to a girl or baby Trump, then you deserve everything that happens to you. And maybe for you that's true. But for the purposes of this episode, I want to hold some empathies for these people because
they are being targeted out of desperation. So before we get back to Haley Welch, it wouldn't be a fair discussion of cryptocurrency without acknowledging how gigantic and needless crypto's environmental impact is in exchange for what it does for the world, which is very little.
If you wanted to be a crypto miner in the twenty tens, your home computer might be enough to get you started. Today you need a bunch of specialized, very powerful computers. They're known as mining rigs, and they use a stunning amount of electricity.
So if you're listening and you're into crypto, know that you are contributing to this problem, which is kind of ironic because helping the environment was one of the early claims that crypto advocates made in its early years. They would cite how much energy and natural resources that conventional banking generated in comparison, and sure, big banks suck up a lot of energy, and that is a valid criticism, but crypto takes up a lot more energy per person.
A UN report from twenty twenty three indicated that bitcoin mining consumed more energy than the entire country of Pakistan in the year twenty twenty one. So I usually save interviews for the ends of these episodes, but there is truly no one better to shepherd us through the world of crypto than Molly White, a prolific writer and investigator of crypto. So I'm going to let her set us up and we'll hear from her throughout the episode.
I'm Mollie. I am a crypto researcher and writer. I've been following the crypto industry for several years now.
What brought you to this specialty?
I got started in twenty twenty one. I think when crypto is going through its major sort of retail moments, where it seemed like, you know, every news article was about crypto, and there were ads everywhere, and people were being told that they needed to buy bitcoin or NFTs or dogecoin or something like that in order to get ahead and to make a ton of money and you know, buy their lambos.
And around that same time.
There was a lot of talk about how blockchains and cryptocurrencies were going to sort of revolutionize the Web and fix everything that's wrong with the Web. And I've always been a big web nerd. I was, you know, a software engineer. I have my own complaints about the Web as someone who really loves it ultimately, but you know, has has watched it become this very sort of hyper capitalized landscape. And so initially I was like, great, let's fix the Web. I'm in you know, when I was
hearing all this stuff about Web three. But then I actually started to dig into it and learn more about it and discovered that, like, wow, a lot of people are getting scammed and it doesn't feel like anyone is talking about it at the time. There are a lot of these like profiles with people who are making it rich overnight, and you know, the dogecoin millionaire and all this stuff, and there was like nobody talking about the downsides of it, which were far more I think important and widespread.
For the tech illiterate. What is web three?
Well, it doesn't.
Really have a very specific definition, which I think is part of the point. I think, generally speaking, web three is just a word that describes taking blockchains and applying them to web problems. So trying to build well web services where the blockchain involved is going to be a web three project.
Just based on the way I've seen crypto talked about in the last several years, I kind of inherently associate it with elon scams. Basically, I think of now there is this sort of like known influencer to cryptoscam pipeline. When did you first notice this tendency?
Yeah, I think the whole trend of celebrities getting involved with crypto projects kicked off sort of around the time
I started paying attention. It had happened before that, So you know, in twenty seventeen, there was this huge explosion of what we're called icos, which is similar to an ipo where a company goes public and suddenly everyone can buy the stock, but you do it with crypto tokens, and the idea was like, now you don't have to go through the SEC registration process, which is extremely challenging and onerous and helpful at preventing scams. There were celebrities
who got involved in that. You know, at that point they were like, we're going to be ico investors, but it was a pretty niche thing, like not that many people are that excited about icos or IPOs for that matter. But then in twenty twenty, yeah, I would say twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, we saw a lot of celebrities getting excited about crypto as not just a way to make money, although that certainly was a big part of it, but to sort of promote themselves and to monetize their brands.
And so there were celebrity NFTs, there were celebrities getting involved in all of these Web three projects that people were talking about. We saw like Reese Witherspoon changing her Twitter profile picture to like a World of Women n f T.
Yeah, like a lot of people have forgot about that.
NFTs. Yeah exactly.
Basketball players were launching NFTs, and you know, celebrities, a lot of like sort of dalists like Soldier Boy.
I think there was like a Super Bowl celebrity crypto ad one year that I remember being like, oh, yeah, this is like really a thing.
Well yeah, and that's the other part of it is that celebrities were being used to promote crypto exchanges and things like that. It was like the crypto super Bowl, but it was basically just before the collapse. Things like really Pee with Crypto dot Com had an ad featuring Matt Damon, FTX had an ad with Larry David. You know, it was like this really weird moment where like, yeah, suddenly all of these celebrities were involved. NFTs kind of fell apart and have I guess been sort of having
a little bit of a revival. But I feel like the biggest trend recently has been these meme coins, which is like you don't even have to bother getting an artist involved. You just make a token with your name and then you promote it, and you know it's like less work basically, and you can still make a bunch of money off of it, or at least that's the claim.
We're gonna check in with Molly More later to talk about hawkcoin style scams specifically. But let's get back into Haley Welch's chaotic end to twenty twenty four when we come back Cryptua.
Maybe welcome back to sixteenth minute.
The Constant is the best episode of Lost. I know it's a popular opinion, but it's my opinion as well. And the best line read of all time from Lost is from season one, episode eighteen.
Haley talks to her about Sam hearing something and this is when she says.
You took and bit the numbers.
Yes, you took and bit the nimbus.
She's supposed to be Australian. Shout out to Mike's Mike And here's the moment you've all been waiting for the hawk to a crypto scam.
So after I saw Michael Saylor speak at the bitcoin conference, I have decided to start putting some money into crypto. And I just want to say, oh my god, thank you so much, mister Saylor.
Last week we talked through Haley's media career as the choice talent of Jake Paul's sports gambling network Better Hailey was the host of Hawktua, and throughout this time her future as a crypto girly was teased in the background. What was also teased was the fact that Haley personally did not seem to understand how crypto worked.
Oh yeah, can I give you some tokens?
Okay?
Are you sure you're I don't know.
I'm not a big a fan about mean coins. I love crypto, but but you could make some money from it.
There's no doubt about it, no doubt about it.
I'm very new to it and I'm still learning what it is.
This episode of Talk to It, the penultimate ever, has Mark Cuban as a guest, the famous billionaire who's just as famously pro crypto. So this was the perfect opportunity for Haley and her team to tease her interest in crypto on her show. The idea of Haley somehow getting involved in crypto had been bandied about as early as her Bill Maher interview back in July, but when it's brought up with Cuban a few months later, Hailey had already been teasing a pivot to the crypto space for months,
both in her appearances and in her online presence. Right around November, when Trump was re elected, Hailey welch her team and whoever is co authoring these damn x posts starts to heavily foreshadow the eventual meme coin that she will launch the next month.
So, I've been in the main trenches for a while, and here's why I got so far.
My'll wallet when on busted US phone and.
Once it's announced, it keeps going with sports betting bro Jake Paul. So by the time Jake Paul fights Mike Tyson on Netflix on November fifteenth, Hailey is in the audience, masked off, trying to court Elon Musk in front facic videos at the boxing match.
How do I get a job in this apartment of government of Can I leave the main?
A few minutes later, still at the boxing match, she's talking about NFTs.
Sun the mine.
I'm so sorry, how rude of me?
Enough to us?
And the day after her interest in naivete surrounding crypto is teased in the Mark Cuban episode of Talk Toua, she formally announces Hawk coin on her ex profile.
Okay, y'all drop your Salona wallets.
I'm giving out some main coins for free, coming to you December four.
And as I alluded to last week, I can't guarantee that nothing has been deleted from her other platforms regarding this crypto launch, but it seems as if she only announced a coin on x, leaving her more relatable platforms as it were, Instagram, TikTok et, cetera empty of a mention, although of course Instagram stories are possible. On November twenty sixth, more details are announced. Haley has partnered with a group called over Here, accompanied by another truly heinous aiimage.
The announcement reads.
Big announcement, we are excited to partner with Haley Welch, the Internet's favorite meme queen behind the viral Hawk to a girl meme, to launch Hawk, a mean coin that's set to redefine the crypto space. Why Hawk is special? This isn't just another token launch. Haley's launch of the Hawk mean coin represents a meaningful step in bringing mainstream audiences to the crypto world, protecting the community with free
token distributions and allow list campaigns. Fans who are newcomers to crypto, We'll get to experience the blockchain in a safer way.
You get it.
This is the one meme coin that definitely isn't a scam.
And they note that they're.
Aware that a lot of Haley's audience knows nothing about crypto, so they want to make this easy as possible. Then they get to the timeline what's next.
November twenty sixth, Today, Haley officially announced the launch of Hawk on x and on her podcast episode with Mark Cuban. November twenty sixth through December third, allow list registration opened for free token claims. December fourth, at five pm Eastern Standard time, Hawk begins trading on Solana.
Haley spoke to TMZ ahead of the release of Hawkcoin and implied that her motivation to get involved in crypto was similar to her motivation to become an influencer in the first place, because if she didn't do it, someone else would, and it was rumored that other people in the meme coin space already were Anyways, it reminds me a lot of how part of the reason she came public as the Hawk Tua girl was because other people
were claiming her identity falsely. Anyways, she tells TMZ the Paper of Record, that she wanted to go into crypto to combat quote a bunch of impostors unquote who'd launched their own meme coins claiming to be her. So again, this pattern of scam before you get scammed. But Haley also knows that she has to sell her fans on the idea that hawkcoin is a good investment, so she closes out the interview by pitching this as a great opportunity for the community.
It's a really good way to get all my fans in community to interact and come together.
Babe Icarus, look out.
Molly White tells me that as absurd as this sounds to the uninitiated, this is a pretty straightforward cryptogrift. The meme coin phenomenon is fascinating to me, I mean, because it seems like they are relatively successful in a niche way.
How why I like.
Yeah, I mean, I think it depends a little bit on how you define success. They can be lucrative for the people who launch them, Certainly, they are very rarely lucrative for those who buy them. You know, there is this sort of brief period of time with meme coins that. You know, they tend to follow a very similar pattern, which is they launch, they spike in price, and then they crash or they crash and then they sort of
peter along for a while. As you know, people lose interests and there are a lot of people who are very excited about them because that for that brief moment at the beginning, if you can generate enough interest and enough excitement around them, people look at it and they go, Okay, if I can buy in early enough, I can be the person who dumps on everybody else and makes a bunch of money.
Right how it feels like customers are encouraged to like get in on the grift of like get here early, and then you can scam others just like you.
Yeah, it's a very cynical model, but that is basically how it works.
You know.
There are certainly some meme coins that sort of like broke containment and became more of a mainstream crypto. So like dogecoin is a good example of one of those, Like it's based around a meme but it has a price that has not gone to zero and stayed there.
But most meme coins are just this sort of flash in the pan thing, and people very rarely look at them and say this is a good business investment, or this is a good long term holding that I'm going to sell in four years and have made a tidy profit. You need to get in on the ground floor and get out as quickly as you can because you know it's going to go to zero.
You know nothing's going to be left after that.
On December third, the last episode of Talk to A comes out, episode twelve entitled How Not to Get Canceled, And on December fourth, hawk cooin and yes, I would agree that it should have been called spitcoin launches with a fair amount of dubious reception preceding it, but on x Haley is excited.
My hawk name coin is love.
Writer for Fortune magazine Leo Schwartz led his piece about the crypto with the headline.
Talk to a girl. Hailey Welch launches crypto meme coin but insists it's not a cash grab.
This would not turn out to be true. Well, hawkcoin took off upon its life launch, swaring to half a billion dollars in coin valuation during its first few hours. The scam quickly revealed itself. The crash came swiftly, as crypto power users often called snipers, abruptly picked off hawk Coin's value, leaving basically nothing for the first time crypto users that Haley's image was used to advertise to, and
the blowback for this rug pull was swift. While the final numbers have not been confirmed, it seems that Haley's team had made somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars off of this scheme, which played out in under a day, and.
Haley Welch, who we know has no.
Experience in the crypto space, copy and paste what her crypto in legal team sends in an x post in an attempt to curb criticism a crypto release which a big account called out as being ninety six percent controlled by Hailey's team in order to artificially inflate the worth of the coin. Haley's tweet denied this, leading to a delightful community note that explained that the team had been selling hawk Coin to bigger investors well before the launch through pre sales, saying the.
Following, Haley is lying and will likely have to talk to a judge about this. Okay, you can play the horns for that.
Because of the mainstream fame that Haley had a mask throughout twenty twenty four. This news broke pretty quickly to the mainstream media as well.
A viral meme coin tied to Hawktua star Hailey Welch is at the center of a lawsuit. Investigators rather investors, claim the Hawk token promoted using Welch's fame wasn't properly registered as a security. The lawsuit targets the Hawk tokens creators and promoters, but not Welsh herself.
This kind of rug pull isn't unusual in the famously scammy meme coin space, but the scale and the mainstream popularity of its subject was unique, and because of this, one of the Internet's most prevalent crypto fraud investigators, a YouTuber named coffee Zilla aka Stephen Findeesen Stay with Me, confronted both Haley over Here and Howie Mandel's villainous cryptosun in law doc Hollywood about the obvious scam on the
night of December fourth, in a Twitter spaces conversation. As one hundred and thirty two thousand users tuned in the spaces conversation, which began as basically a fifteen minute lecture from Doc Hollywood got tense pretty quickly when they opened the floor for questions.
I have questions.
I have questions.
I'm raising my hand.
Take out.
That's copy Zilla.
Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I've ever seen in my Okay.
It's not going well anyways, here's Doc Hollywood.
Profiting from the rugs relevant.
We didn't we didn't pull a rug. I don't know what you're trying to say. It's not true. That's defamation. The man you're saying that we pulled the rug. You're the fabing are you?
Are you not gonna are you not gonna let me talk?
You just talk over me?
You talk over me.
I'm hearing both is now. What Doc Hollywood does not know is that coffee Zilla was showing up to this conversation with notes. He presses on the Good Doctor about why Hawkcoin had been marketed at fans of Haley's who had never invested in crypto before.
These are people that are outside of crypto that we're going to be onboarding, and they don't give a ship. They don't even know what a market cap is. They just go, oh, cool, free coin.
Uh.
Now I get to join the community cool done.
In his video, coffee Zilla also explains that he had acquired their initial pitch deck for hawkcoin, where the scam is all but encoded into the plan.
From one slide, Hawk will unite Haley's global fan base, enabling fans to connect with each other through the talk to a podcast, and social media. This token redefines mean coin by offering a new class of consumer crypto.
Okay, pitch deck, let's do the for dummies version next slide.
Hawk will onboard normies, non crypto users by linking to Web two social media, making it easy for Haley's fans to create wallets via social login and claim free tokens.
Oh, so they're willing to admit they are intentionally targeting a naive market. Suffice it to say that, like scams before it, it appears that Haley's team designed the coin to make a shitload of money for themselves upfront, and then fuck anyone who is naive enough to buy it when they're profiting. Inevitably made the value of the coin crash. But even before coffee Zilla entered the chat the night that the coin launched, the team was already on the defensive.
While it's normal for a crypto rugpole to happen quickly, it was still rare for it to have happened in the space of a single day, and none of the legally is that Halian company shouted out in their own defense was particularly convincing. And while coffee Zilla was the journalist to most explicitly break the scam down, the whole crypto world was hissed about this from the moment that token was announced and encourage those who had been scammed
to seek legal protection. This is a tweet from a firm called Berwick Law who ended up becoming a major player in this story.
If you lost money on Hawk, contact our firm to learn about your legal rights. Our firm represents thousands of NFT and token investors in securities matters. This is attorney advertising.
While by all accounts, this crypto scam is very commonplace, what makes it stand out is, as coffee Zilla said, it's targeting of first time crypto users in order to rip them off, the mainstream nature of the mean personality and honestly, how flagrant doc Hollywood comes off in this call with coffee Zilla, which went viral several times over and I think rightfully. So, Howie Mandel's son in law calls the people who invested in his crypto coin mentally ill.
Most of you, we don't want you in the community. Let's be real, right, You're not great people. I know, y'all right, I see some friendly faces in this audience.
He's having a melt out.
You know, you guys. I'm gonna say, y'all, you guys right, there's a lot of negativity in the space. I think crypto brings the mentally ill into this thing, right most if you guys are in crypto, you're most likely mentally ill. And I'm gonna I'm going to count myself is mentally ill for even being here right now.
So no one can look more unhinged than Doctor Showbiz here. But Haley Welch obviously is not coming off well in this call either. She barely says anything because she didn't orchestrate this scam.
She just represents it in a moment that is iconic. You can't deny it.
At some point in this contentious conversation between a man who identifies as coffee Zilla and a man who identifies as Doc Hollywood, arguing about their make believe computer money Haley's fight or flight instinct seems to kick in, and since she doesn't know enough about crypto to fight a journalist who specializes in crypto, she gets the fuck out of there in the funniest way possible, interrupting a different journalist while doing so true like.
I guess I to interrupt you, Nick, Hello there, but any who, I'm gonna go to bed and I'll see you guys tomorrow.
Okay, She goes full cartoon chipmunk mode.
She gets the fuck out of there, and the Twitter spaces press conference ends.
And believe it or not, that was the last.
We heard from Hailey Welch personally for weeks.
But as always, Haley.
Ducking out of the spotlight didn't make much of a difference. The people who had gotten ripped off in the meme coin scam were justifiably pissed, and a lot of other online users seemed to relish in her fall for a main character who they felt had overstayed her welcome and maybe didn't even deserve the attention she'd gotten in the
first place. After the Coffee Zella video called Exposing the Hawk to a Scam took off the day after the rug Pole the media attention around Haley, Doc Hollywood and Hawk Cooin skyrocketed, and Haley's publicist, you might remember he is the same publicist who represents Bruce Springsteen, messaged coffee Zilla after that Twitter spasis fiasco, telling him that Hailey was essentially paid to promote the token instead of orchestrating the scheme, going on to say that she received one
hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for promoting it. When Coffeezilla asked if Haley would see a cut of this pre sale money or the scammy three million dollar fees that he had confronted the crypto team with, the publicist said that after expenses were recouped, Hailey was supposed to have gotten fifty percent of net proceeds from the coin,
but that that agreement hadn't been finalized yet. But Coffeezilla felt and I agree, that this is extremely vague and does not specify if Hailey Welch would get these scam proceeds to the tune of one point five million dollars if the crypto team managed to get away with this.
I don't know. I think this whole situation is terrible and she should feel bad. I hope she does, because she got in bed with these people who clearly saw dollar signs. She saw dollar signs, and they did this and people have been hurt.
But here's the thing, we don't really know how Haley feels about any of this, maybe because she doesn't care to stay, or maybe because she's kind of muzzled because of the legal risk that saying anything could have, especially in an industry she never had much of a grip on. Understandably, the internet went nuts with the whole I'm gonna go to bed moment, and then came the lawsuit, although at the time of this writing it is just the crypto
team that's being sued, not Hailey Welch herself. On December nineteenth, Berwick Law Remember them, sued the distributor for the coin, the promoters for.
The coin, and thankfully.
Someone finally had the good sense to sue Doc motherfucking Hollywood. And probably expectedly, when this lawsuit was filed, on behalf of the people who had been scammed, over Here and Doc Hollywood turned on each other abruptly.
In a tweet.
Over Here said that it was the Doc who controlled all the fees in token decisions, not them, and to the public's delight. Hailey Welch appeared to wake up from that nap of hers a little over two weeks later, on December twentieth, posting what is at the time of this recording her final tweet.
I take this situation extremely seriously and want to address my fans, the investors who have been affected in the broader community. I'm fully cooperating with and I am committed to assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted as well as to help uncover the truth, hold the responsible parties accountable, and resolve the matter. If you have experienced losses related to this, please contact Berwick Law is in the link below.
And while Hailey continues to repost memes on TikTok, we really hear from her as a personality. Is an unrelated post on Instagram from late December which shows pictures from a trip to Hawaii she took with Chelsea Bradford, her best friend. They're kind of the Bonnie and Clyde of internet fame. They're just riding it out to the bitter end.
At present, the case hasn't been decided, but the public's response to seeing these scammers painted into a corner was universally positive, and this positive reception seems to have empowered Berwick Law to push even further.
Into the crypto scam space.
On January sixteenth, just a couple weeks ago, Wired reported that the same firm was suing pump dot fun, the site that made it so easy to run mean coin scams in the first place, and for the moment, that's where Haley's story ends. There's been a lot of disagreement on whether Doc Hollywood and company will experience any meaningful legal consequence for this, but what we do know is that Hailey Welch herself doesn't seem to be legally on the hook for anything, at least not right now. It
seems like maybe she just went back to bed. And when we come back, Molly White's take on what this shit show says about the future of crypto Welcome back to sixteenth minute. Please pause this episode and go to the link in the description to give to a GoFundMe for a middle class family in Alta, Dina that's lost their home.
I can wait.
Thank you, I did it too. And today we are with deepest regrets, ending our Hactuas series by discussing the incredible speed run of our main carearacter of twenty twenty four, Hailey Welch. To close out this episode, Here's the rest
of Molly White in my talk. She's the writer behind Web three, is going just great citation needed, and is a prolific Wikipedia editor, a legend, and so I wanted to ask her not just what she thought of the hawk Coin scam, but what this means for the future of these kinds of grifts, because I don't know if you've noticed, but the sitting American President seems thrilled about them.
Here's our talk which.
Brings us to hawk Tua and hawk Coin.
I believe it is.
As this summer went on, I was observing Hailey Welch's journey. I'm curious because it's sort of escalated to this recent cryptogrift. Are there certain things to look out for? Are there warning signs that a viral star is going to start a cryptogrift before the grift is announced?
Well?
I wouldn't say there always are, but there certainly were with Hailey Welch, because you know, I heard of her around the time the original meme went viral, and then I forgot about her, and then the next time I heard about her was in July when she turned up to the Bitcoin twenty twenty four conference in Nashville and was like rubbing elbows with RFK Junior all of a sudden, and people were like, oh my god, the Hawk Tua girl is at the Bitcoin conference and I was like, oh, no,
here we go, you know, And she had, by that point, I think, maybe started her podcast and was, you know, clearly trying to make her fifteen minutes fifteen seconds of fame, I guess, into this bigger brand and you know, make it into maybe a lucrative I don't know if career is the word, but certainly, you know, make some money
off of it. And that is always a sign that you know, meme coins maybe in the future, and then certainly once they start hanging out in the crypto worlds, you probably could have that easy money on that that she would eventually get to this.
For me, the red flag was the station with the Paul brothers. They they only have bad.
Ideas, and they have a long history of crypto scams as well. I mean they've been in that since the ground floor, basically offloading NFTs and things like that on their fans.
Going up to the actual grift. Can you walk me through how this was done and what if anything differentiates the hawk to a grift from another crypto grift.
Yeah, so there's kind of a handful of ways that people start meme coins. It's become very easy to do so over the last year or so because there have been these platforms, including one that's called pump dot fun, which is like a very popular platform where anyone can launch a meme coin in a matter of minutes, and it's really sort of reduced that sort of technical barrier to entry that previously existed and has certainly helped to fuel this explosion in meme coins where it seems like,
you know, something happens and suddenly there's twenty me coins based around it within a span of minutes. Because you know, the sort of point is to get as much media attention as possible, and so if you can be the first person to sort of glom onto a viral moment, then you can potentially make money. Or at least that's the theory.
It feels more like it's a it's a like pr challenge more than anything else.
Oh for sure, that's one hundred percent the case, and so the way that you know, celebrity meme coins. The work is a little bit varied because often it's not the celebrities themselves, you know, sitting down at a computer and designing this token. There's often some sort of a partnership with supposedly experienced people in this world who are the ones you know, designing the tokenomics, which is what they like to call the sort of distribution schemes and
things like that. People who speak the language of the crypto world have made quite a lot of money off of sort of offering to be a conduit for celebrities and take all of the hard stuff off of their plate basically, and all they have to do is endorse it and promote it on Twitter and take their cut
at the end of the day. And that seems to be what happened here with the Hawktua girl, where you know, she was not the one on Pumped Up Fun you know, typing in the parameters and all that, but she was working with this group of promoters who promised to sort of help her with the hard stuff.
Is there a particular reason why she is being singled out and called out if this happens all the time.
I mean, I would argue that probably more people should be singled out and called out total types of things. Yeah, because her particular grift was I think not particularly unique. It's not clear to me that she is personally culpable in a way that more meme coin creators maybe, But she's certainly been a fun target for a lot of people who are angry about.
You know, this particular scam.
But I think a lot of it is really just the jokes. You know, it's it's fun to make jokes about Hawk to a girl, and you know, she's been sort of portrayed as this villain because it's kind of funny to say that, like, Hawk to a girl just stole all your money in ways that maybe it's not with just any general meme coin.
What was done here is so clearly a scam and is so clearly wrong, but I just wasn't sure if it was uniquely wrong or if this is the playbook.
Yeah, I was actually just talking to someone about this. Where in the crypto world, things like this happen so often that I think people often forget that they're illegal. Pumping numps are actually like illegal thing to do wash trading, which is where you sort of fake buying and selling of tokens to increase the price and to sort of make it look more popular than it is. That's illegal, but it's so common in the crypto world and it's so rarely enforced that it's like it has become this
accepted way of doing business in the crypto world. That's sort of what we're seeing here, where like, yeah, pumping and dumping is illegal, rug pulling is illegal, it's also an everyday occurrence, and the two things are not sort of mutually exclusive. I think you see that a lot with even when it comes to enforcement cases and legal action, where people are like, I can't believe you're singling out Kim Kardashian or something like that, like because what she's
doing is so common. You know, when she was targeted by the SEC because she was doing paid promotions for cryptotokens without disclosing she was being compensated. But like, if you look at crypto Twitter, that's all you're seeing.
That's every day.
Stuff, and so it almost feels unfair to be targeted for that when it's so rarely enforced, And honestly, you could probably make an argument that it is unfair, but part of the regulatory regime is trying to sort of make an example of people to try to deter others from doing similar activity. And so that's why you tend to see these legal actions coming out against the Kim Kardashians of the world and not some no name cryptos camera.
Our case is like this an opportunity to set a higher precedent. Do you see cases like this altering the types of griffs we're going to see?
I suspect not with this one.
For what I would be kind of surprised if legal action comes of it. I know some people have speculated that, like, oh, hawk to a girl's going to jail, and again it's a part of the joke, and it's it's a funny idea. But in the grand scheme of meme coin disasters, this one was pretty small. Again, it's not clear to me how much intent Haley Welch herself had around scamming her fans beyond the sort of normal amount of scam that's
involved with meme coins. I don't necessarily expect the SEC to like come out and make a big example of Hailey Welch, especially right now with political changes and regulatory changes that are looking to even further decrease how many enforcement cases the SEC brings against crypto projects. And so I suspect that, you know, this is all a fun laugh and I don't think it will really meaningfully change
how many people start these projects. In fact, I suspect there are people out there looking at Haley Welch and going, maybe I could do something.
A shot, Yes, sort of.
In all, publicity is good publicity aspect to this well, and I think that it should probably be a lesson to celebrities who are considering getting involved with this. They I'm sure many celebrities have received outreach from these types of people who work with celebrities to launch meme coins, who probably don't pitch this as a scam to the celebrities.
You know, they use all the talking points about how this is a great way to engage with your fans and to create a community around your meme coin, And it might be tempting to some celebrities who are not familiar with this, but ultimately they're running the risk of
being branded as a scammer. Most of these things, even if they don't collapse quite as spectacularly is this one, are still pretty naked cash grabs and so I don't think it's something that many people who are trying to maintain any form of legitimate reputation would necessarily want to get involved with.
Yeah, I mean a podcast is one thing, although still offensive, but it's so funny that yeah, now it's like, oh, the best way to engage with your fans is to create a new kind of money and make them.
I guess the one.
Thing that I try to point out when it comes to meme coins like this is, you know, the people who are looking at them and saying, maybe I can be the one who gets in early. Maybe I can be the one who makes a killing off of this when it spikes by a thousand percent before it completely crashes. It's important to realize that in the crypto world, for many people, it is literally not possible to get in
early enough to make money on these things. There's this whole ecosystem of bots, and it's called token sniping, where you know, there's all this infrastructure out there that is fairly sophisticated people doing the same thing you're trying to do, sitting at your computer watching Twitter and so getting the idea that you are going to be the one who
gets in early enough to profit off of. This is a very dangerous idea because it's you're trading against people who are, despite the fact that they're trading meme coins, relatively sophisticated.
In this type of thing.
And when it comes to meme coin markets, but certainly crypto markets more broadly, I think a lot of people tend to look at them as it somewhat similar to stock markets and sort of other highly regulated trading venues, and that is also often a mistake, because you really should not be putting trust into even the exchanges where you're trading, the people you're trading against, the platforms that are supposedly helping you to do this trading, because there is,
like I said, just such a failure of the regulatory apparatus to maintain these legitimate and sort of safe markets for retail investors to trade in. So I'm always cautious about, you know, talking about these things in a way that might give people the impression that, like, ooh, you know, maybe I can be the one who makes a killing off of this, because it's stacked against you in ways that people often don't realize.
Thank you so much to Mollie. You can follow all her work, and Web three is going just great at the links in the description, And here we find ourselves at the end of the hawk.
To a series. Is this purgatory? Have we been dead the whole time?
The whole time, the whole time you would the whole time?
Is the only useful lesson here? Never trust Gizmo's son in law. Maybe, But ironically enough, I think it is this same son in law, not Hollywood himself, that has the key to not only what the victims of the crypto scam believed, but what I think probably motivated Haley Welch to become a part of this scheme in the first place.
The people here that you guys are already y'all have had every day thinking everything's a scam. And you know what, you guys are right, Everything is a scam, but not this, not this.
You're right, everything's a scam, but not this. Contained in the words of this coked out freak is an insight into online culture today. The days where someone would be surprised to be taken advantage of online are long gone. To some extent, It's an expectation of being online.
It's the rules of play.
So why are so many people still getting scammed. I think it's because of what Doc Hollywood is saying. A good scammer can convince you that, sure everything is a scam, just not this. Why is this normal girl from Tennessee using her image to rip off people just like her, people in a position that she herself would have been in just six months earlier. I don't know for sure, but I can say that it feels pretty nihilistic in
the way that a lot of American culture is. Here is this young woman that went viral after being coerced into creating content for someone else outside of a bar. She panics for a week, then seems to realize that while this isn't what she wanted, maybe it's a blessing in disguise.
She's grown up on the Internet.
She's seen this happen to people before, and she knows that if she doesn't try to capitalize on this, someone else is going to.
They've already started.
She's grown up poor, she has witnessed the American scam firsthand. The only way you die above the class you were born in now is for something extraordinary to happen. And sure, some people strike it big professionally in a way that helps and enriches the lives of others. But if you're trying to do it quick, probably not. Again, none of this justifies financially extorting other people, but I do think
it contextualizes it. But when the shine wears off of this initial moment, maybe the podcast is a little amateurish.
Maybe the public seems to.
Be moving on from the meme she seems.
To say fuck it.
Maybe it's possible to be convinced by the bad actors you've surrounded yourself with the doc hollywoods and the Jake Pauls, that you can get a solid cash out on your way out the door of relevance. That becoming the scammer is how you really jump classes. Because for all intents and purposes, that's true. All she has to do is convince the people she's scamming that they're the scammers too.
I am honestly really curious where Haley Welch goes from here, if anywhere in the influencing space specifically, But if this is it, I think Hayley ended up getting caught between the scammers and the scammed, because yes, she absolutely used and monetized her image to rip off a lot of people. Who had not gotten lucky in the same way that she had.
But it's just as.
Undeniable to me that she was exploited and deceived by the people surrounding her more than once. First by the guys who posted the clip of her without explicit permission, who then yelled at her publicly for not cutting them in on her success. Then with the management that often openly acknowledged that they knew she was seen as a
sexual object and that that made her uncomfortable. The same management who openly said that they didn't think she was smart enough to understand what real Hollywood representation would mean. You don't need to feel bad for her, but Haley absolutely got scammed here too, because even if she's not the one getting sued, she's the one who gets discarded in her first national interview a thousand years ago, all the way back in July twenty twenty four, from that piece.
They all think they know so much about me, she continues, but nobody knows shit about me. Do you want them to, I ask, We'll shoot a gbus smile. Don't worry they will before it's over with.
Hailey, Welch the Hawk to a girl. Your sixteenth minute ends now, I hope for your sake. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened to this series. Please tell your damn friends about it.
For crying out loud.
And next week we will return with a real mystery, one that collides the classic exploratory, weirdo Internet communities of lost Media and creepy pasta fans the back rooms next week on sixteenth Minute. Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and iHeart Radios. It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is
by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kats Flee and Casper and my pet Rockbird, who will outlive us all.
Bye