Influencer Haliey Welch, who rose to fame as the “Hawk Tuah” girl from a viral TikTok video last year, became the epicenter of a major controversy after launching a dubious cryptocurrency meme coin called $HAWK in December.
The token hit the roof in mere hours, reaching a market cap of almost half a billion dollars, before plummeting back down and leaving investors hanging out to dry. The events cemented it as yet another classic pump-and-dump, a recurring fixture in the largely unregulated crypto world.
In the months since, and following an investigation by the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Welch has attempted to repair her reputation, with some seriously mixed results.
Now, in a new episode of her podcast “Talk Tuah,” the influencer told the story of what had happened, claiming she had absolutely no idea of what was going on at the time, despite her name and brand being plastered all over the meme coin.
“I couldn’t tell you how crypto worked the day that coin launched,” she said. “I had no idea. I don’t know. So that screwed me.”
Innocent bystander or not, the incident certainly highlights the dangers of investing in dubious meme coins — and how easy it is to get lured in by the promise of a get-rich-quick scheme, something even the president of the United States himself has demonstrated.
In her latest podcast episode, Welch recalled how the FBI knocked on her grandmother’s door, demanding to search her phone.
“They went through my phone, so they cleared me,” she said. “I was good to go.”
She also surrendered her phone to the SEC for “two or three days,” allowing them to “clone” it.
Welch claimed she “wasn’t named on the lawsuit,” which was filed by investors in New York against the meme coin’s creators, mere weeks following its launch.
At the time, she wrote in a since-deleted statement that “I take this situation extremely seriously and want to address my fans, the investors who have been affected, and the broader community.”
For her part, Welch claimed in her podcast this week that she only “got paid a marketing fee” and never made a “dime from the coin itself.”
Apart from dodging a bullet by not getting roped into a lawsuit, Welch appeared apologetic.
“It makes me feel really bad that they trusted me, and I led them to something that I did not have enough knowledge about,” she said. “I did not have enough knowledge about crypto to be getting involved with it. And I knew that, but I got talked into it, and I trusted the wrong people.”
The money she took for promoting the money has since gone to “PR crisis, a new lawyer, stuff like that,” Welch said. “So I’ve really come out with nothing. All that trouble for nothing.”
While the class action lawsuit filed against $HAWK’s creators is still ongoing, Welch’s experience highlights the importance of reading the small print.
In many ways, even a simple Google search for meme coins and the likelihood of things going south could’ve sufficed. “Rug pulls,” as they’ve become known, have become dime a dozen, with fraudsters absconding with millions of dollars worth of crypto after selling investors on a lie.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” Welch said in the footage. “I wish we knew then what we know now. It would’ve saved us a lot of trouble.”
