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A group of 12 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against two creators of HAWK, a meme coin promoted by Haley Welch, the HAWK Toa girl, in the Eastern District Court of New York this morning.

Welch is not a party to the lawsuit, which lists only its business partners, the launch pad and the Cayman Islands Foundation as defendants. Welch became the latest celebrity to launch the Solana memecoin this year — and she's not the first to be impressed with it.

Haley Welch became the face of the "Hawk Tuah" meme after posing as a man on a street social media post in Nashville this summer. Improbably, Welch turned her short clip into a promising influencer career: her podcast Talk Tuah rose to number 4 on the charts.

Welch also made some cryptocurrency links, the audience Bitcoin nashville and encore By default At the Korean Blockchain Week. Her X profile picture is a reference to the Mog memecoin.

In late November, a little-known company called overHere announced that it had partnered with Welch to launch HAWK, a meme coin that would “redefine the cryptocurrency space.” The code for HAWK is only The product is listed on overHere. It was founded by Clinton Su, a Hong Kong resident and one of the defendants in the lawsuit.

“We have been very transparent about the limited scope and extent of our involvement in the Hawk Tuah token project. We are confident that we have done nothing wrong. As for any litigation, we will leave "The process takes place in court."

Crypto Twitter personality Alex Larson Schultz, a Los Angeles resident known online as Doc Hollywood, also helped promote the launch. The lawsuit says some HAWK tokens were pre-sold and used to fund the project.

The lawsuit adds that the token debuted on December 4 and saw a significant rise in market value before falling by 90%, all within a few hours. Welch, Sue, and Schultz initially defended the botched launch in Space X before largely disappearing from social media over the past two weeks. Welch has not posted or uploaded anywhere online since the accident.

He actually threw Schultz under the bus over the incident: the overHere X account posted that Schultz/Doc Hollywood had full control of the token and “disappear When things got tough.” OverHere Welch and her team highlighted that they wanted to leverage “the potential of Web3” but didn’t have the expertise to do so in an intelligent way.

Celebrities being taken on a trip by business partners to encourage them to launch hopeless projects is a time-honored tradition in the cryptocurrency space - just... I ask Caitlyn Jenner. And reading between the lines, that seems to be the case here as well. The fact that Welch is not a defendant in the suit is clear in this regard. This story becomes even sadder when the famous character is a 22-year-old girl who became famous overnight.

Max Borwick, whose Borwick law firm filed the suit alongside Wolf Popper, told me the firm is “engaged in discussions” with Welch’s lawyers.

He added that the case "highlights a troubling pattern in the cryptocurrency space: the targeted exploitation of the names of celebrities and public figures for profit, often at the expense of ordinary people."

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