“I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah, but you took my life savings,” wrote one X user earlier this month. That’s a sentence you probably never imagined read
“I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah, but you took my life savings,” wrote one X user earlier this month. That’s a sentence you probably never imagined reading, not even when Haliey Welch—a.k.a. Hawk Tuah Girl—first burst into the national zeitgeist after a nine-second clip of her talking about giving blowjobs (“you gotta give ’em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang!”) went viral this summer. With her plucky, can-do attitude and Dolly Parton accent, the 22-year-old from Belfast, Tennessee, parlayed her 15 minutes of fame into something of a business empire: Soon enough, she was selling merchandise, making public appearances, and launching a popular podcast. But the bubble may have burst with her ill-advised foray into cryptocurrency, which cost certain investors a huge chunk of change at best, and at worst, may have been criminal in nature. Here’s how Hawk Tuah Girl went from viral sensation to the recipient of an SEC complaint in record time.
When we were first introduced to Miss Hawk Tuah in June of this year, she was simply an unwitting social media star on the rise. In the past six months, Welch has sold oodles of merchandise, been signed by management firm The Penthouse, and launched the punnily named podcast Talk Tuah With Haliey Welch (get it?). Produced by YouTuber turned boxer Jake Paul’s production company, Talk Tuah has featured an assortment of celebrity guests, including Paul himself, comedian Whitney Cummings, rapper Wiz Khalifa, and Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban. Oh, and her grandmother, Granny Welch, came on the pod for an episode uncomfortably titled “I Told Granny About Hawk Tuah.”
Talk Tuah immediately found an audience, ranking at number five on Spotify just a few weeks after its premiere—trailing The Joe Rogan Experience but besting Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. While it didn’t wind up cracking Spotify’s top 10 podcasts of the year, Talk Tuah, like its namesake, certainly made an impression, and currently boasts 202K subscribers on YouTube.
YouTube isn’t the only place where Welch is making an impression. Her personal Instagram account has approximately 2.6 million followers, her TikTok has 1.8 million followers, and her X account has 424.5K followers. Out in the real world, Welch has continued her victory lap, following a surprise guest appearance at a Zach Bryan concert with an appearance on Bill Maher’s podcast. In August, she threw the ceremonial first pitch at a Mets game. In November, she released a Gen Z targeted dating app called Pookie Tools, which uses AI to assist users (and got middling reviews).
Everything was coming up roses for Hawk Tuah—that is, until she got involved with cryptocurrency. On December 4, Welch announced that she was launching her own memecoin, a Solana-based crypto coin called $HAWK. OverHere, the team that partnered with Welch to sell the memecoin, posted on X that $HAWK would “redefine the crypto space” and present a “meaningful step in bridging mainstream audiences with the crypto world.” In an interview with Fortune, Welch herself assured skeptics that this was “not just a cash grab” like all those other memecoins.
“$HAWK isn’t just a memecoin, it’s a part of the culture,” OverHere’s website assures. “Haliey is using her meme to unite her entire community. From: TikTok, Talk Tuah podcast listeners, merchandise buyers, and even her charity supporters. Hundreds of thousands of non-crypto users will be onboarded by $HAWK because Haliey is making it easy, fun, and engaging. If you love Haliey, you love memes. And $HAWK is where it all comes together.”
And the coin certainly united individuals—against Welch. Shortly after $HAWK went live, its value spiked and hit a market cap of $490 million—impressive, to be sure. But 20 minutes after that peak, $HAWK fell to $60 million; in a few hours, $HAWK lost over 90% of its value.
What happened? That depends on who you ask. Skeptics, like YouTube crypto journalist Coffeezilla, have accused Welch and her team of engaging in a “pump-and-dump” scam, in which they quickly inflated the value of $HAWK (to the tune of almost half a billion dollars, mind you) and then immediately sold off their coins, causing the $HAWK’s value to crash. (That’s the same sort of scheme Jordan Belfort perpetuated in The Wolf of Wall Street.) Welch’s lawyer responded to Coffeezilla, and the team denied the pump-and-dump accusations at the time the video was posted. Welch’s lawyer further clarified their stance to the YouTuber, stating that the percentage of net proceeds from the allocation of tokens to Welch “wouldn’t be realized until if/when she sold them,” and out of that percentage, “she would have to pay her non-crypto team too, so in reality, she would likely only hold 3.5% of the tokens withdrawn.”
“The episode has all the markings of a dreaded ‘rug pull’—crypto slang for a familiar scam where bad actors hype a new project to investors to drive up the price. They then sell off a stash they kept for themselves, leading the value of the new cryptocurrency to plummet,” Leo Schwartz wrote in Fortune. “They’ve turned this into a one-day pump and dump,” said Nicolas Vaiman, the founder and CEO of blockchain analyst Bubblemaps.
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