- Celebrities Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather Jr, and Paul Pierce have been sued over the EthereumMax pump and dump
- The trio promoted EthereumMax, which dumped soon after hitting exchanges
- A group of retail investors claim that the trio, and the EthereumMax founders, intentionally lied about the coin’s potential
A group of celebrities who promoted the pump and dump scheme EthereumMax have been hit with a class action lawsuit after they were accused of causing investors to lose their money. The collective, Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather Jr, and basketball player Paul Pierce, promoted the cryptocurrency prior to its launch in June 2021, where the price spiked to $0.0000005 before crashing, never to recover. The founders, who are also listed as defendants, are alleged to have lied about the potential of the token in order to garner interest, only to sell their stash at the top.
Celebs Helped Hype EthereumMax
Celebrities promoting cryptocurrencies is nothing new, with the practice really gaining traction in 2017 amid the ICO boom. According to the suit, the founders asked the celebs to “(tout) the prospects of the Company and the ability for investors to make significant returns due to the favorable “tokenomics” of the EMAX Tokens”, when in fact their sole plan was to profit personally by selling their stash of tokens at the peak soon after launch.
The activities of the trio, ranging from social media to in-person promotions, ensured that EthereumMax reached an audience in the hundreds of millions, which the lawsuit alleges convinced ill-informed investors to pick up EMAX tokens, only to see the price collapse soon after launch:
Mayweather Can’t Kick the Crypto Promo Habit
The plaintiffs are asking for returns on their investments given that they feel they were lied to over the messages that accompanied the EthereumMax promotions, with the suggestion that on at least one occasion the celebrity shillers did not clearly state that they were being paid for their praise of the scam.
For Floyd Mayweather of course, the EthereumMax case is far from the first time he has become entangled in legal action over ICO promotion – in December 2018 he settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his promotion of the doomed Centra Tech ICO.
