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Haliey Welch, colloquially known as the “Hawk Tuah girl” — I just imagined that, after she lives a long and happy life and peacefully passes away in 75 years, will “Here lies Hawk Tuah” be on her headstone? — has returned to the public eye after the launch of her cryptocurrency blew up in her face in an alleged “pump-and-dump” scheme.
The Hawk Tuah crypto scam involves tons of terms that might as well sound like Chinese to some people of a certain age, so I’ll try to break it down as plainly as possible (frankly, I had to research this all myself, as well).
Hawk Tuah chick, Haliey Welch (how her name is actually spelt), went viral over the summer for a man-on-the-street interview in which she came across as a fun, flirty, sexually adventurous Southern Blonde chick — that’s really all it takes to go viral these days, because in the following months, she racked up over 4 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, and launched a podcast that immediately charted in the top five across the country. The American dream.
Instead of just staying in her lane and making brain rot internet content, however, Welch got involved in crypto, launching a coin called $HAWK on the Solana blockchain (see what I was saying about Chinese?) in December.
The coin’s value initially surged, reaching a market cap of nearly $500 million, but it plummeted by over 90% within just a few hours, leading to rampant accusations of a “pump-and-dump” scheme, wherein developers inflate a cryptocurrency’s value before selling off their holdings, thus causing an immediate crash.
The “pump-and-dump” allegations resulted in multiple lawsuits and Welch vanished from the public eye, last releasing a podcast on December 3, which was ironically titled “How to avoid getting canceled.” Until this week, where she apparently leaked a new episode with FaZe Banks, a YouTuber and gamer. Alright — you follow? Now that you have the context, here’s Hawk Tuah crying. Similarly — you ever sometimes wish the movie Armageddon was a reality?
— ۟ (@rebootjays) February 7, 2025
“I feel really bad for all the people that got affected by it. And it just didn’t go the way I planned… I probably should have looked into him a little bit more,” Welch says during the podcast.
“All the money out of this episode is getting donated to all the animals that have been affected by the fires out here,” she later adds.
After the interview, the 33-year-old FaZe Banks then took to social media to declare that he was just “tryna pipe” the 22-year-old Welch. The YouTuber also blasted Welch’s team for leaking the video of the podcast.
Tbh I was just tryna pipe
— FaZe Banks (@Banks) February 6, 2025