YugaLabs, creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Moonpay — a crypto fintech Protocol, is facing a class-action lawsuit for allegedly using celebrities to misleadingly promote and sell NFTs.
Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Justin Bieber have been sued in a proposed class action accusing them and a host of other celebrities who promoted the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs to their audience.
The truth is that the Company’s entire business model relies on using insidious marketing and promotional activities from A-list celebrities that are highly compensated (without disclosing such), to increase demand of the Yuga securities by convincing potential retail investors that the price of these digital assets would appreciate,” reads the complaint filed last Thursday in California Federal Court.
The suit also names Madonna, Kevin Hart, Stephen Curry, Snoop Dogg, Serena Williams, Post Malone, The Weeknd, Fallons’ production company Electric Hot Dog, Inc. and Universal Television, among others. It claims most of them were recruited by talent manager Guy Oseary, who spearheaded a scheme with Yuga Labs to discreetly pay them for their endorsements through crypto firm Moonpay.
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Guy Oseary’s venture capital firm, Sound Ventures was an early investor in Moonpay, according to the complaint.
Guy Oseary is allegedly linked to several of the celebrity promoters, including Bieber, Paltrow and Hart, through their early investments in Moonpay.
By increasing demand for BAYC NFTs and YugaLabs’ Apecoin crypto tokens, the suit alleges they also increased demand for Moonpay.
Oseary, the MoonPay Defendants, and the Promotor Defendants each shared the strong motive to use their influence to artificially create demand for the Yuga securities, which in turn would increase use of MoonPay’s crypto payment service to handle this new demand,” the complaint reads.
At the same time, Guy Oseary could also use MoonPay to obscure how he paid off his celebrity cohorts for their direct or off-label promotions of the Yuga Financial Products. Lawsuit being brought by a pair of NFT “investors”, who are mad about not finding a bigger fool to sell to— A pox on them all.
According to what was in the news, the filing claims that the defendants violated the law by not disclosing their relationship with YugaLabs in endorsing NFTs, on the other hand Yugalabs denies all accusations.
Moral of the story – maybe you should not take investment advice from celebrities, always do your Research before Investing on Crypto, NFT and DEFI Assets because of its high Volatility nature.
