To be fair, it probably wasn't Hawk Tuah who rugged - usually what happens is the rug people pay an influencer to hype the coin.
I just hope girl got some millions for herself In many ways this is just the perfect story for our times
She was probably the only one dumb enough to hold lol It's kind of amazing anyone still falls for these scams - you have to know your dumb money IS the rug money
She couldn't sell. That would look too obvious. Apparently she has 10% stake and has to hold for at least a year and gets 50% of proceeds after some admin cost is paid out. It looks like she got $125k up front though (lawyer response to the Coffeezilla guy). What it looks like they did is distribute or pre-sell the con ... I mean coin ... to a bunch of friends and friends of friends (called "strategic" stake and 17% of the float) who had the right to sell right away at launch with lockup expiry period. My guess is they also hire some people (i think they are called snipers) to drive the price up at the open by buying big lots of the small float available to attract the suckers and then dump on all of them. Or maybe the snipers are independent ...regardless, those "strategic" people holding the coin dumped a big chunk of their coins which is visible on the blockchain. Oh yeah ... and whoever was organizing this charged 15% fee on transactions which was supposedly meant to keep snipers away. They pocketed more than $1m in those fees.
This is why we don't let people promote unregistered securities. Unless you are an insider, you will be the bag holder. But great news, David Sacks is going to the Trump's AI and Crypto Czar!
Just to add ... by giving tokens away to "friends", they can say that the insiders involved in the project didn't sell anything ... but who knows what kind of deal they have with those "friends" that got free tokens or paid an amount to get them.
I kind of thought we'd seen the end of these kinds of super obvious insider rugs Ms Tuah really ought to invoke her right to silence pretty quickly
It is very very much the opposite. These things are being made continuously on the Solana blockchain, most of them rugging within minutes. It's honestly like a slot machine for the people putting money in - you find out pretty much immediately whether they come out up of down. Usually down, of course. Like a slot machine.
From comments I've seen, this one might have been big enough that the SEC will have to do something about it to set an example. I don't pay attention to this world, but it looks like there is stuff like this going on very often but on a smaller scale.
Definitely If you did something like this for just a few million in actual securities you'd be prosecuted for real. Crypto has been lol nothing matters but that has changed in recent years. This is a fairly obvious criminal fraud for a wild amount of money. She is very stupid to be saying anything which indicates she is involved in operations
Well ... actually there are a lot of pump and dump schemes in the market and the SEC doesn't really do much about it. From pump trading rooms that charge for "education" to companies that put out BS PRs to pump and dump. There is a lot of shit that goes on unchecked and I am not even talking about OTC markets.
Milei is in the one situation where you want a free-market libertarian. Argentina's government apparatus was purposefully bloated to obscene levels in order to create jobs for the party membership. You need a true-believer type to go at that level of bloat. It does help that he is an actual economist.
It may just work. "Argentina’s economy is experiencing a notable shift, reporting a 3.9% growth in the third quarter of 2024 compared to the previous quarter. This growth is a welcome change after three quarters of decline, but the annual data tells a more complex story. The GDP has dropped by 2.1% compared to the same quarter last year. However, this is an improvement over analysts’ predictions of a 2.6% contraction." https://www.riotimesonline.com/argentinas-gdp-grows-3-9-in-q3-2024-after-recession/