The infamous Hawk Tuah girl, Hailey Welch, has been included in a new filing after she cooperated with the law firm. The filing is part of the existing federal class action lawsuit against the creators of the memecoin launch she promoted last year.
The lawsuit alleged that Welch was paid approximately $325,000 to be an essential part of a token launch, which promised features that it could not technically deliver. The filing stated that the launch of the coin was premeditated to crash within minutes after its release.
Welch receives funds for promoting HAWK
Court documents revealed that Welch was previously excluded from the lawsuit, which was filed just weeks after the Solana-based token launched. The social media star and podcast host previously said in a now-deleted post on X that she was fully cooperating with the law firm Burwick Law that’s suing her business associates to uncover the truth.
Burwick Law previously stated that it intentionally left Welch out of the lawsuit as it felt it was the most effective way to make its clients whole. However, the law firm asked the court to allow it to amend the lawsuit to include Welch, her manager, Jonnie Forster, and the company, 16 Minutes LLC, as defendants.
According to Court Listener, the law firm also included new fraud allegations and sought an order to serve existing defendants, Clinton So and OverHere Limited.
The filing revealed that Welch’s company, 16 Minutes LLC, signed a Meme Token Creation and Monetization Agreement with Memetic Labs about five months before launching the memecoin. The agreement required Welch to promote the token across all social media channels in exchange for $125,000 upfront, with an additional $200,000 upon reaching promotional milestones. The lawsuit also revealed that Memetic Labs was granted a 50% lifetime profit share tied to the token’s trading activity.
On-chain data revealed that HAWK rose to a market capitalization of $490 million within less than 15 minutes of its launch. The token immediately collapsed in value by 93% minutes after its launch.
Lawsuit links HAWK’s insiders to other memecoin rug pulls
The lawsuit alleged that the collapse of HAWK wasn’t coincidental, but rather an intentional scheme designed to occur in that manner. The suit added that insiders purchased large portions of the token’s supply before selling $1.27 million in tokens just minutes after launch.
Blockchain forensics later found that the pseudonymous wallets orchestrating the scam were not random actors. The same wallet clusters were found to have funded, executed, or laundered proceeds from multiple other rug pulls. Other notable rug pulls included LIBRA, M3M3, AIAI, and the infamous TRUMP snipe.
The suit found nearly identical timing patterns, funding flows, and extraction methods in the wallets across the schemes. Burwck Law also claimed that those schemes were all rug pulls and followed similar on-chain patterns to what happened with HAWK.
Welch has been included in the latest lawsuit due to her role in promoting HAWK based on misrepresentations about the token’s potential utilities. The filing also alleged that the influencer’s manager, Forster, was responsible for Welch’s branding, including the embrace of the memecoin. The manager is also accused of promoting the token himself. The law firm added 16 Minutes LLC as a defendant in the case, due to being the operating entity for Welch’s career that signed the monetization agreements.
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