Haliey Welch, aka the Hawk Tuah Girl, has opened up for the first time since her cryptocurrency crashed and cost people a significant amount amount of money.
Welch, who became a viral meme last year for her infamous 'You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thing!' line, has been in hot water since she launched her $Hawk coin, which drastically gained in popularity right up until it crashed.
She kept her silence on social media since she first addressed the scandal after claims that her coin was a scam surfaced by unhappy investors.
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With so much information swirling around about the meme coin, let's get into everything that we know so far.
Who is Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah girl?
The 21-year-old has only recently found fame after becoming an overnight sensation with her 'hawk tuah' joke while being randomly interviewed on a night out for a YouTube channel.
Welch, who comes from Belfast, Tennessee in the US, has been grabbing all of the opportunities presented to her and those things have come hard and fast after her viral video.
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Since the now-viral YouTube video saw her reach fame of crazy heights, she has quit her day job, sang on stage with country music star Zach Bryan, started a merch line and even launched a podcast.
She soon amassed an enormous following because of her stance regarding male pleasure.
What is the $Hawk coin?
Welch's digital coin originally hit a $490 million market cap after launching on 4 December, before it suddenly plummeted and lost 95 percent of its value within hours.
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This led to some people, including YouTube cryptocurrency investigator Coffeezilla, to accuse Welch of using a 'pump and dump' scam.
This is where the coin gets hyped up before its launch so that the coin would boost its price, and then sell it for profit and it plummets. However, Welch’s team blamed so-called 'snipers' for the loss of value.
Snipers are bots who buy tokens immediately after a launch and then they sell up when prices spike, causing it to lose its value.
Investors of the $HAWK coin ended up filing a lawsuit against the coin’s creators, which accused overHere Ltd., its founder, Clinton So, Tuah The Moon Foundation and social media influencer Alex Larson Schultz of promoting and selling cryptocurrency unlawfully which was never properly registered with the SEC.
The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and does not name Welch as a defendant, as per NBC News.
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What has the reaction been to the suit?
Burwick PLLC and law firm Wolf Popper LLC, said that $HAWK’s token 'surged' to $491 million after launching, but its 'meteoric rise was short-lived, as the $HAWK token’s value plummeted by over 90% within hours, dropping below $100 million.'
The first said via a press release: "This extreme volatility left many investors, particularly first-time cryptocurrency investors drawn in by Haliey Welch’s involvement, facing significant financial losses."
Many have felt scammed and angered about the losses, and even blame Welch for a lot of it.
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What has Welch said about the crypto controversy?
The social media star issued a statement on X in December, explaining how she is taking the situation 'extremely seriously' and is 'cooperating with the legal team representing the individuals impacted', as well as 'to help uncover the truth, hold the responsible parties accountable, and resolve this matter'.
Welch then went off the radar, but she is now back with her podcast Talk Tuah, as an episode with FaZe Clan’s founder Banks has been ‘leaked’.
Welch explained how she got involved with the coin, stating that it was supposed to be a ‘long-term coin’ that would ‘change the way everybody thinks about crypto’.
“And I feel really bad for all the people that got affected by it,” Welch said. “And it just didn’t go the way I planned.”
In the clip, she said the ‘biggest mistake’ was trusting the guy who was a ‘friend of a friend’.
“I probably should have looked into him a little bit more,” Welch explained.
She went on to say that the guy was 'little bit weird' on the day of the launch and this actually made her ‘suspicious’ of him.
She's also cooperating with police to rectify this situation.
Banks has since hit out following the leak of the podcast episode, slamming Welch’s team for ‘fumbling the bag yet again’ as the episode was leaded as he said: “These were nonstarters and we were told this episode would only ever see the light of day if we explicitly green lit it.”
Banks then told Welch to ‘fire everybody’ and he added: “Poor girl, it’s a wonder how she found herself in this position in the first place.”
LADbible Group previously contacted Welch’s reps for comment.
Topics: Cryptocurrency, Hawk Tuah girl, Social Media, US News
Britt Jones