Haliey Welch, better known as the viral “Hawk Tuah Girl,” has faced backlash following the failed launch of her memecoin $HAWK, which crashed by more than 90 percent just hours after it hit the market. Now, the 22-year-old internet personality is being accused of scamming investors.
This week, Welch attempted to cash in on her viral fame by launching her own memecoin — cryptocurrencies that are based on viral memes or pop culture references, such as Dogecoin and Pepecoin.
Speaking to Fortune before the launch, Welch insisted that her memecoin, named HAWK, was “not just a cash grab.” However, less than 24 hours later, at least one investor has already filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
When HAWK launched on the Solana blockchain on Wednesday (December 4) evening with a price of $0.005492, it quickly surged more than 900 percent and accumulated a market cap of $490 million. The token’s price peaked at $0.00004028, the Crypto Times reported, before its market cap plummeted to $60 million, marking a whopping 91 percent decline in value.
The rapid nosedive was credited by some to insider wallets and snipers — entities that rapidly buy up huge amounts of a token’s supply at launch — which reportedly controlled between 80 and 90 percent of HAWK’s supply. According to Cointelegraph, one wallet managed to purchase 17.5 percent of the memecoin’s supply worth $993,000 at the time, and sold it less than two hours later for a profit of $1.3 million.
Many online commentators accused Welch and her team of a “pump and dump” scheme, whereby coins are bought at a low price, heavily promoted to inflate their value, and then sold off at a peak, often by company insiders.
Welch has denied all allegations of insider trading, stating in a X/Twitter post that her team “hasn’t sold one token and not 1 KOL was given 1 free token.”
“We tried to stop snipers as best we could through high fee’s in the start of launch on @MeteoraAG,” she wrote. “Fee’s have now been dropped.”
The Independent has contacted Welch’s representatives for further comment.
Welch’s manager, Jonnie Forster, previously told Fortune that Welch will own 10 percent of the supply of HAWK but will not be able to sell it for one year.
“I don’t really see it as, like, a gambling thing,” Welch told the outlet. “I think it’s, like, a fun way to get my fans to interact.”
Still, that hasn’t stopped social media users from making light of the crypto controversy.
“She’s gonna have to Talk Tuah judge soon,” one person wrote on X, while someone else replied: “She just hawk tuahed 1M dollars from our pockets.”
Welch shot to viral fame in June as “The Hawk Tuah Girl,” thanks to an NSFW on-the-street interview posted by YouTubers Tim Dickerson and DeArius Marlow. Since then, Welch has signed with an agent and launched her own podcast, Talk Tuah.
