"I'm going to bed": The Hawk Tuah scam fully explained a year and a half later.
In December 2024, Hailey Welch, the 22-year-old woman famous for a sexual joke made on a street interview lost her entire "career" in about 20 minutes. Her fans lost a lot more.
What happened:
Welch, better known as “Hawk Tuah Girl,” went viral in June 2024 after a street interview clip racked up hundreds of millions of views overnight. Interestingly enough, what followed was a surprisingly successful parlay of merchandise, a podcast, and millions of followers that she used to leverage into brand deals and sponsorships. By late 2024, she somehow became one of the most recognizable internet personalities in the country.
In early December 2024, Welch launched $HAWK, a memecoin on the Solana blockchain, promoted as some “transformational cultural token” that would somehow integrate with her podcast to offer holders subscription-style benefits. The hype worked. Within minutes of launch, $HAWK hit a market cap of $490 million.
Twenty minutes later, it had lost 95% of its value.
She pulled the rug… or so we thought.
How did this thing even work??
To understand why $HAWK collapsed, we first need to understand how a memecoin launch is structured and what a memecoin is.
A memecoin, by definition, is a cryptocurrency inspired by internet memes, jokes, or viral trends. Many of them are backed by influencers from Logan Paul and KSI to President Donald J. Trump.
Three separate teams built $HAWK, with Welch’s existing management team handling her brand. A company called Memetic Labs, run by a guy who goes by "Doc Hollywood” online (also the son-in-law of Howie Mandel??, whatever), controlled the actual blockchain side–tokenomics, minting, distribution, marketing. A third company, overHere, handled the tech infrastructure.
Here’s how the tokenomics broke down (the economic rules and design of a crypto token). When $HAWK launched, only 2% went to the public allocation, meaning only 2% of the coin's supply could be bought by regular people. Another 17% was labeled “strategic allocation,” which means it was sold to private investors before launch. The remaining 81% was distributed amongst interconnected wallets belonging to insiders.
Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps mapped those wallets and found out that 96% of all $HAWK supply was concentrated in a single cluster of related wallets at launch. overHere, the tech firm that ran $HAWK, pushed back on this, saying that the 96% figure included strategic wallets, reserves, and community funds. Fine. But here’s what they didn’t dispute: the 17% that went to strategic investors had no lock-up period. Zero. They could sell the moment trading opened.
Coins backed by influencers tend to skyrocket at launch with insane immediate activity. This meant that the “strategic investors” could sell their holdings right when the coin launched, profiting in the millions.
And they did.
The team also made a decision that looks either stupid or deliberate depending on your level of generosity: the coin launched with 15% transaction fees – on both buys and sells – claiming it was a mechanism to deter sniper bots. Sniper bots are basically just automated bots that buy tokens in the first seconds of a launch before any human can react, then sell them the instant the price spikes. The team basically said that the enormous fee would price the bots out, so even though it would make it more expensive for real purchasers, it would increase the amount of tokens available, thus helping the human consumers.
While this all sounds great, in actuality, the fees did not deter the bots, infact a singular bot grabbed $17.5% of the supply in the opening seconds and quickly flipped it for ~ $1.3 million within ninety minutes. The fees did, however, generate approximately $2 million for the team, collected from every retail buyer who piled in because they idolized the Hawk Tuah girl.
The sequence pretty much went as follows: insiders and bots bought early at insanely low prices, retail fans bought in because their favorite internet personality had her name plastered all over it, the price hit a $490 million market cap, insiders and bots sold, the price collapsed by 95%, fans were left holding worthless tokens, and the team collected $2 million in fees on the way out.
Yikes.
Internet detective Coffeezilla (who actually inspired this article) confronted the team on X (formerly Twitter) Spaces; an “X Space” is basically a call hosted by certain accounts that can control who can speak, etc. Think of it as a virtual press conference. On this call, Coffeezilla put it plainly: “This is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve been tracing it on [block] chain for a while. You guys generated over a million dollars in fees while your fans got rug-pilled. There were snipers, but there was also insider trading directly linked to your creator accounts.
The team denied it, claiming they hadn’t sold a single token. If you’re gonna lie, at least make it believable (smh). They blamed the crash on “external market forces.” At around 1 am, Welch interrupted the discussion between Coffeezilla & Doc Hollywood to say she was going to bed, subsequently ending the call.
The recording has since been deleted from her X account. (The account was also later deleted & banned.)
Where Welch fits.
Welch’s defense is that she was just the face. She was a victim, just like everyone else. She didn’t design the Tokenomics; Doc Hollywood did. She didn’t control the wallets; overHere did. She showed up, promoted the thing, and trusted the wrong people.
That argument holds for all of 10 seconds until you realise she’s just spewing nonsense.
Five months before the launch, her company, 16 Minutes LLC, signed a “Meme Token Creation and Monetization Agreement” with the teams behind $HAWK. She agreed to promote it across all platforms in exchange for $125,000 upfront, $200,000 more in bonuses, 10% of the total token supply, and 50% of net trading proceeds.
She then spent the next few months telling her fans – people who followed her because they liked her, not because they understood crypto – that $HAWK was some transformational token that would change the world. The token had no technical infrastructure to transform anything.
Naïve? Yeah. But saying “I didn’t know” is not the same as “I’m not responsible”. She signed a contract. She got paid. Her fans got destroyed.
The template.
$HAWK is not a one-off. It’s a legit business model.
The formula is pretty simple. Find a celebrity with a large, naïve audience. Offer them a flat fee plus a percentage of the net proceeds. Launch a token engineered as a pump-and-dump, with most of the supply locked up in insider wallets. Let the celebrity’s fans push the price up. Sell.
This has been used and abused on a much bigger scale. Argentina’s President Javier Milei promoted the LIBRA token, which briefly hit a market cap of $5 billion before collapsing to zero. Then came the TRUMP memecoin, launched two days before the presidential inauguration. Billionaire Justin Sun was confirmed as the top holder of $TRUMP, which got him dinner with the President. We live in a time where you can literally buy your way to the leader of the Free World. Great.
The bottom line.
Hailey Welch probably didn’t know she was signing up for a scam. But that’s being very generous. She also just didn’t ask enough questions about a financial product that she was being paid to sell to the very people who put her in the position to earn that much money. Those two things can both be true, and as unfortunate as it is, the law only cares about the first one, which is why the people behind $HAWK are untouched.
Until influencer liability exists in a meaningful form – until the person plastering their face on a financial product bears some legal responsibility – the formula keeps working.
The celebrity gets paid. The fans get wrecked.
If you took anything away from this, it should be to, under no circumstances, invest your hard-earned money in memecoins.
See ya next time,
Atharva.