TECH: Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather are sued for cryptocurrency scam.

A class action law­suit has named Kim Kar­dashi­an, Floyd May­weath­er and bas­ket­ball star Paul Pierce as defen­dants for pro­mot­ing a cryp­tocur­ren­cy called Ethereum­Max. Accord­ing to Fin­bold, the plain­tiffs sued the celebri­ties and as yet uniden­ti­fied enti­ties behind the tokens for sky­rock­et­ing the val­ue of the imi­ta­tion Ethereum so “they could sell their share of the float at a prof­it.” The law­suit lists any­one who invest­ed in the token between May 14 and June 27, 2021 as a defendant.

As Giz­mo­do explains, the plain­tiffs accuse the defen­dants of per­pe­trat­ing a “pump and dump” scheme in which investors sell their shares to earn a lot of mon­ey after orches­trat­ing an increase in its val­ue. The law­suit says the coin’s val­ue rose 632% after May­weath­er and Pierce pro­mot­ed it — the box­ing star wore shorts with the URL Ethereum­Max in her exhi­bi­tion match with Logan Paul, while that Pierce tweet­ed about it.

Mean­while, Kar­dashi­an post­ed an Ethereum­Max post on Insta­gram Sto­ries, telling her fol­low­ers that she heard about it from her friends and link­ing to her website.

Accord­ing to Morn­ing Con­sult, 19% of sur­vey respon­dents who said they had heard of Kar­diashi­an’s posi­tion invest­ed in Ethereum­Max accord­ing­ly. The law­suit says the day after Kar­dashi­an’s post, the token’s val­ue dropped 98 per­cent. More­over, the cre­ators of the coin are said to have sold their shares before the prices drop, as shown by their port­fo­lio activities.

Celebri­ties have been pro­mot­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy tokens for quite some time now and are even cre­at­ing their own. This isn’t the first time or the last that they will be caught up in token controversies -

May­weath­er, for exam­ple, was charged by the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion in 2018 for fail­ing to dis­close that he was paid $ 100,000 to pro­mote Cen­tra Tech’s ini­tial coin offer­ing in 2017. Two of the founders of Cen­tra Tech were arrest­ed on charges of secu­ri­ties fraud and wire fraud, with the SEC accus­ing them of “brag­ging about non-exis­tent rela­tion­ships between Cen­tra and well-known finan­cial insti­tu­tions” in an attempt to get peo­ple to invest in the ICO.