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two men behind a range of cryptocurrency Promoted by people like the First Lady melania trump and President of Argentina xavier miley has been accused of being involved in Danger and “exploiting celebrity associations and ‘borrowed fame’ to sell legitimacy to unsuspecting investors”, according to a new legal filing.
According to the report, a federal class action lawsuit was brought in April this year against Benjamin Chow and Hayden Davis, co-founders of crypto exchange Meteora and venture capital firm Kelseyer Labs, respectively. wired,
The duo were initially accused of a multimillion-dollar scam involving a single memecoin, $M3M3, but an amended complaint by the same plaintiffs later expanded the allegations to also include fraudulent practices, accusing them of market manipulation to benefit $LIBRA, a coin promoted by Miley, whose value dropped shortly after launch.
The latest proposed version of the complaint, submitted to the court on Tuesday, accuses the first lady of staking Chow and Davis of pumping and dumping at least 15 crypto coins, one of which was $MELANIA.
Melania Trump posted a promotion for coin on January 19 this year, a day before her husband donald trumpin which she directed her followers to its website and wrote: “The official Melania meme is live! Now you can buy $MELANIA.”
The lawsuit does not name her as a defendant, but instead claims she was used as “window dressing for a crime engineered by Meteora and Kelsier.”
Independent The White House has been contacted for comment.
In the proposed amendment, the plaintiffs claim that by the time they launched $MELANIA in January, Chow and Davis had “developed a repeatable six-step ‘playbook’ for pump-and-dump fraud.”
They allege that Meteora was responsible for the technical infrastructure used in the creation of the coins, while Kelsier supplied the start-up capital and handled promotion. In the case of $MELANIA, the latter reportedly recruited a network of crypto influencers to promote the coin on social media for a fee.
The immediate reaction upon its January launch was overwhelmingly positive, with the coin’s value increasing 12-fold to a peak of $1.6 billion, although it has reportedly lost 95 percent of its value.
“Investors reasonably interpreted the use of Melania Trump’s name and likeness as evidence of legitimacy and due diligence – believing that no one of her stature would knowingly be associated with a fraudulent enterprise,” the latest version of the complaint says.
But, in fact, crypto wallets controlled by Meteora and Kelsier had accumulated nearly a third of the entire $MELANIA supply, the lawsuit says, meaning: “Insiders had cornered the market before a single public buyer could act.”
Once their price started rising, those wallets duly sold their coins, making millions of dollars. This ultimately caused the value of $MELANIA to collapse, causing significant losses to any outsiders who purchased.
“Melania Trump’s misuse of the name aggravated the harm,” the amended complaint concludes.
“It corrupted public trust and added an element of political and cultural credibility to what was really a standard pump-and-dump.”