The creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of NFTs and its promoters, including Madonna, Paris Hilton and Justin Bieber, were sued by investors claiming they were duped into buying the collectibles by celebrities who didn’t disclose they were paid to pump sales.
Yuga Labs Inc., the blockchain start-up behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary and MoonPay USA LLC, a company controlled by Oseary, were accused in the proposed class-action lawsuit of leveraging their network of A-list musicians, athletes and celebrities to misleadingly promote and sell Yuga financial products.
The “promotional campaign was wildly successful, generating billions of dollars in sales and re-sales,” the investors said in the complaint, filed Friday in Los Angeles federal court. “The manufactured celebrity endorsements and misleading promotions regarding the launch of an entire BAYC ecosystem (the so-called Otherside metaverse) were able to artificially increase the interest in and price of the BAYC NFTs during the relevant period, causing investors to purchase these losing investments at drastically inflated prices.”
