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Celebs sued for promoting crypto crap [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2023-02-13

Remember when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton sat on his show listlessly blathering on about their apes? They among various other celebrities are being sued for what was, allegedly, undisclosed and paid-for promotion of Bored Ape Yacht Club and other crypto wheezes at the peak of the NFT hype cycle. They pumped it, the lawsuit contends, but when the inevitable crash came it wasn't them holding the bag.

The class action lawsuit claims, "this purported interest in" Bored Apes "by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by [Hollywood agent Guy] Oseary at the behest of" Yuga Labs. "In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts." The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay. When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on "The Tonight Show" that he'd bought his first NFT through MoonPay. "MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto," Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, "You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you."

Just look at this Paltrow tweet! As if she would randomly come up with this.

The likelihood that these lawsuits will force private correspondence into the public record has also seemed to reignite those long-held suspicions that the ape designs were "ironic racism" of the Internet kind where the irony turns out to be a fig leaf.

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