Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the hawk tuah coin crypto scam spectacular

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Between June and December 2024, Haliey Welch completed one of the most astounding main character runs of all time. Beginning as someone with no social media, catapulted to fame all but against her will after talking to on-the-street YouTubers targeting drunk women, the end of the year saw Haliey "Hawk Tuah" Welch acting as the face of exploitative memecoin scandal. In our final part of the Hawk Tuah series, we look into the history of crypto, a play by play of the Hawk Coin scandal, and what it means when you scam before you can get scammed. Follow Molly White's work here: https://www.mollywhite.net/linktree/ Watch Dan Olson's "Line Goes Up" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g Watch Coffeezilla's "exposing the hawk tuah scam" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHq8AWR1Rg  List of Displaced Black Families in Altadena: https://lasentinel.net/displaced-black-families-gofund-me-directory.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretate. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episode. Every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth Podcasts with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

And I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoolZone Media. Hi, everybody. Jamie here with just a few notes up top. Thank you so much for listening to the Hocktua series. If you haven't listened to the previous parts, I would recommend you do so.

I just wanted to mention because it doesn't come up in the space of this episode that we have done our due diligence. We reached out to Haley Welch's team. We heard back and then we were slow ghosted to date. So now you know. Also, if you enjoy the show, you can head over to our Reddit board. Normally I wouldn't suggest going on a Reddit board, but it's actually very lovely and wholesome. Our slash 16th minute, if you have ideas for future episodes you'd like to see, or if you just want to have a nice time with the nice listeners of this show. Also, one more note, the documentary I'm talking about towards the beginning of this episode is by Dan Olson. It is called Line Goes Up.

It's on his YouTube channel, folding ideas. It's fantastic. Okay, Hawk 2 of Part 3. Let's go. I'm not so bad when we turn up the lights, but I'll be perfect,

all in a time. Don't make me a start Let's take it too far Then give me one moment Let me see A minute Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minute of fame

Sixteen minute of face One more minute of fame Welcome back at the Internet of the Internet Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the Internet's characters of the day and see how their big moment affected them and what it says about us and the Internet. And today, in a truly grand finale,

we are going to take a look at the scam that took down viral star Haley Welch, aka Hawk to a girl. For now, at least. If there's one thing I've learned in the course of making this show, it's to never count a diva out. And for many of you, this may be a moment in Haley's online career you thought would have come much earlier in the series. Her crypto scam.

Cryptoscams being something that I have postponed trying to understand for half a decade at least. But for everyone, a day does come, and so hath mine, and perhaps so hath yours. So I guess just a disclaimer, if you do understand crypto, even in a basic way, this part may be a little frustrating for you, but if you don't, I will walk you through this as best I can. Because this is the moment that I suspect most people are going to remember about Haley Welch. While most people didn't know much more than her original viral moment up until this time,

and maybe some checked out Tok Tua. This, the crypto scam, became the legacy. The Hokka Tua girl might be going to prison for the dumbest scam in history. Hock twa girl, also known as Haley Welch, launched her mean coin hawk last week. The coin soared to a market cap around $400 million before tanking. This girl just ruined her entire career. And honestly, we all saw this coming, right? So how does this crypto launch for Hawkcoin go from being Haley, Doc Hollywood, and the team,

hailing it as the biggest opportunity in years to Doc Hollywood calling everyone who had invested mentally ill in under 24 hours? Well, first, let's set the scene. A brief history of crypto. Alongside a recap of Haley Welch's life. Attempts at cryptocurrency were underway years before Haley was born. The idea was first conceived in 1983, was acknowledged by the NSA in 1996, and systems like BitGold were bandied about before the internet went mainstream, and finally, the technology ran smoothly enough to announce formally over a decade after that.

Haley Welch was born in 2002, to a lower class fractured family in Tennessee. Her earliest years were under two consecutive George W. Bush presidencies, heading into kindergarten around the time that the housing bubble in the U.S. got really bad during the mid-2000s. Then, in late 2007, the Great Recession began, and it had a massive effect on Tennessee, slamming the job market for years to come. And in a complete coincidence, I'm sure. As the public's faith in big banking understandably plummeted,

the idea of cryptocurrency finally became palatable in the mainstream. In 2009, Bitcoin was launched by Satoshi Nakamoto, who Haley Welch, not for nothing, regularly parodied on X, calling herself Hokk Toshi Tuamoto. I know, really creative. Anyways, crypto continues to grow and shrink in a pretty niche market in these early years. Silk Road is launched in 2012 and then it is shut down by the FBI several years later. The way that the crypto blockchain works at its simplest is that it's a decentralized activity log of financial transactions

that relies on a consensus mechanism among users that often ends up sewing a fundamental distrust. in understanding what these numbers on this blockchain actually mean. Basically, it requires a hell of a lot of checks and balances for users to get clear answers. And that kind of labor can be very time-consuming for someone who's just an individual doing crypto in earnest alone. So most people you hear that have been very successful in crypto have a team doing this labor for them in order to maximize their own personal profit. Crypto, as professor of computer science and economics, Jen Lansky qualified, requires the following.

First, its value is maintained through consensus and not a big bank central authority. Second, the system will decide when new cryptocurrency can be minted. Third, ownership can be proven only in the crypto blockchain. Fourth, crypto can be transferred but transaction states. can only be accessed by the current owner. And finally, if two ownership changes are requested at once on the blockchain,

only one of these transactions can be acted on, something that ends up screwing over a lot of people down the line, it seems like. As crypto becomes more normalized, even in niche internet communities, interest then moves to a currency called Ethereum, a version of cryptocurrency that became very successful by market itself on the idea that crypto bypasses government corruption and doesn't just force you to sign up for a new set of unregulated corruptions. For years, as Dan Olsen explains, there were these unbased rumors that various countries,

Brazil, Venezuela, were on the brink of switching their entire economies to cryptocurrency. But this was never really true in retrospect. In fact, it was a result of the effort of crypto boosters, making it seem like the currency was far more popular abroad than it actually was. After the Ethereum boom came the NFTs, a crypto gateway of sorts that was something of a play to get Normies into crypto that seemed to work pretty well at the time. For a couple minutes, at least, you probably remember this. NFTs were a craze in the early 2020s, which happens to be another time.

of incredible economic despair, in which people paid for quote-unquote true digital objects, which many, including me, thought meant that you were buying the copy, the definitive copy, of a digital artwork. And so in the early days of its mainstream popularity, NFTs expanded to the sale of memes. We've actually talked about it on this show before in our overly attached girlfriend episode. There was this small boom where the major meme main characters of the 2000s and the 2010s took the chance to monetize their image that in most cases had been involuntarily taken and co-opted from them and actually made money off of them for the first time. However, as Dan Olson's documentary explains in great detail, NFTs ended up being a scam of their

own. It was a way to imply scarcity about an infinitely reproducible image. And NFTs became synonymous with art during this boom in the early 2020s. First coming into the news when an artist named Beeple, Fine, sold 69 million dollars worth of NFTs. What's even more relevant, though, is that this sale was made at Legacy Auction House Christie's, which gave a whiff of legitimacy to the project that NFTs previously had not had by a long shot. NFT ended up being the crypto version of the speculation market or the collector's market, which always crashes.

The example that comes right to mind for me is Beanie Babies. When they're first released, you can get them for about $5 to $7. Once they retire, the value goes up. In like two years, there was like $245 and stuff. It's worth about $4,000. But it goes far back as the tulip bulb spec bubble of the 17th century. We've been overvaluing things that are ultimately kind of trash for a long time. NFTs were perceived as exclusive collectibles, which on most timelines boils down to,

and I hope you actually like them because they almost never retain their value. Thankfully, I love my beanie babies, and I don't care that my mom spent my college fund on them. In line goes up, Dan Olson also emphasizes that the marks and the targets for these crypto scams aren't the fabulously wealthy that we see in media. The marks are people somewhere in the middle class, people with some disposable income who are still. long-term financially insecure enough that they'd take a risk on something as tenuous as a crypto scam. As Olson puts it, the target of these scams are, quote, tenuously middle class, socially isolated, and highly responsive to memes. While this was happening, Haley Welch graduated

high school in 2020 in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, beginning community college but dropping out to focus on her day job. As we've talked about before, Haley loved her home, her family, her friends, but unquestionably grew up during a time of extreme economic and social precarity. It would probably be hard for her to remember a time before bad job markets and gun safety drills to evade mass shootings in school, when all the while the way to quote unquote make it in America was shifting from the conventional become a star model to the internet version of the become a star model become a star get your grift in and get the fuck out of there which brings us to meme coins meme coins are a newer form of crypto that are famously unstable

and scammy and saying something is particularly scammy in the crypto world is really saying something Meme coins are exactly what they sound like. They're a currency whose relevance depends on the appeal of the meme personality who is the face of them, whether that meme is a person or a fictional character or an idea. The most successful examples and one that I think has tragically crossed into the mainstream is the Ilan Musk touted Doge coin, which is based on a meme of a Shiba Inu who, bless his heart, he didn't see the storm coming. Meme coins of this nature

tend to be sold as crypto on the bizarrely and I guess aptly named website pump dot fun. And the name itself is a wink at how many pump and dump schemes the space has been known for over the years.

The site was started by three guys in their 20s in London and this was a space that sort of facilitated the resurgence of crypto after NFT, sort of took a turn in the early 2020s. The New York Times reported that in the front half of 2024, 1.7 million coins launched,

compared to just 250,000-ish in the same period of time in 2023. So if you've heard about meme coins more, it's certainly not an accident. And stars of the 2024 space outside of Haley, whose eventual coin was called, coin were maga coin ear coin after Donald Trump got shot in the ear baby Trump coin one of the coolest parts of my job being able to do this every day is seeing different projects and I love these trump meme coins that have come out like maga and obviously now baby Trump that's the one that that I am sharing with you now and you know what it makes you smile what and there are celebrity coins. Manosphere influencer and convicted criminal Andrew Tate launched a quarrying called Daddy Coin. Flop rapper Igiazalia started one called Mother Coin. There was one called Tom and

Jelly. You name a cursed idea. Someone probably tried to launch it as a meme coin last year. So even though crypto fell out of favor in a major way in 2022, Pump Dot Fun and these meme coins had a big hand in bringing them back because of how easy this website made it to get a crypto coin minted. For as low as $2, perhaps a bone-chilling AI image of baby Trump, and boom, you've created the stupidest new economy on the planet. But because the barrier to entry for making meme coins is so low, this space tends to bring in new people to crypto, which, as we will learn, is kind of the perfect setup for a rug pull. In short, a rug pull is a pretty basic crypto scam

that basically consists of overhyping the eventual value of a meme coin, promising a lot and then pulling the rug out from investors, selling off all of the valuable assets of the token well in advance so that everyone else is more or less completely screwed over shortly after the token launches and the best. crashes. I'll let my guests explain it better, but that's the idea. If you're a fan of a certain meme or personality, or for some reason, Iggy Azalea, you could cash in on the popularity of a meme to lure in investors, the average of whom, as Dan Olson says, is a middle-class person throwing in

around $350 on average, then pulling the rug and causing them to lose it all. But here's a weird thing that was striking me the more I looked into this world. Even the most starter crypto investors seem to have a basic understanding that crypto is to some extent a scam for most people. The true rugpole, I think, is the average investor finding out that they're not the scammer, they're the scammed. And I know that plenty of people have said that if you get scammed by like hawk to a girl or baby Trump, then you deserve everything that happens to you. And maybe for you, that's true.

But for the purposes of this episode, I want to hold some empathy for these people because they are being targeted out of desperation. So before we get back to Haley Welch, it wouldn't be a fair discussion of cryptocurrency without acknowledging how gigantic and needless crypto's environmental impact is in exchange for what it does for the world, which is very little.

If you wanted to be a crypto miner in the 2010s, your home computer might be enough to get you started. Today, you need a bunch of specialized, very powerful computers. They're known as mining rigs, and they use a stunning amount of electricity. So if you're listening and you're into crypto, know that you are contributing to this problem. Which is kind of ironic because, because helping the environment was one of the early claims that crypto advocates made. In its early years, they would cite how much energy and natural resources that conventional banking generated in comparison. And sure, big banks suck up a lot of energy, and that is a valid criticism,

but crypto takes up a lot more energy per person. A UN report from 2023 indicated that Bitcoin mining consumed more energy than the entire country of Pakistan in the year 2021. So I usually save interviews for the ends of these episodes, but there is truly no one better to shepherd us through the world of crypto than Molly White, a prolific writer and investigator of crypto. So I'm going to let her set us up and we'll hear from her throughout the episode. I'm Molly. I am a crypto researcher and writer.

I've been following the crypto industry for several years now. What brought you to this specialty? I got started in 2021, I think, when crypto is going through its major sort of retail moments where it seemed like every news article was about crypto and there were ads everywhere and people were being told that they needed to buy Bitcoin or NFTs or Dogecoin or something like that in order to get ahead and to make a ton of money and buy their Lambos. And around that same time, there was a lot of talk about how blockchains and cryptocurrencies were going to sort of revolutionize the web and fix everything that's wrong with the web. And I've always been a big web nerd.

I was, you know, a software engineer. I have my own complaints about the web as someone who really loves it ultimately, but, you know, has watched it become this very sort of hypercapitalized landscape. And so initially I was like, great, let's fix the web. I'm in, you know, when I was hearing all this stuff. about Web 3, but then I actually started to dig into it and learn more about it and discovered that, like, wow, a lot of people are getting scammed and it doesn't feel like anyone is talking about it. At the time, there were a lot of these, like, profiles of people who are making it rich overnight and, you know, the Dogecoin millionaire and all this stuff. And there was like

nobody talking about the downsides of it, which were far more, I think, important and widespread. For the tech illiterate, what is Web 3? Well, it doesn't really have a very specific definition, which I think it's part of the point. I think generally speaking, Web3 is just a word that describes taking blockchains and applying them to web problems. So trying to build web services with a blockchain involved is going to be a Web3 project. Just based on the way I've seen Crypto talked about in the last several years, I kind of inherently associate it with Elon scams, basically. I think of Dogecoin. Now there is this sort of like known influencer to crypto scam pipeline.

When did you first notice this tendency? Yeah, I think the whole trend of celebrities getting involved with crypto projects kicked off sort of around the time I started paying attention. It had happened before that. So, you know, in 2017, there was this huge explosion of what we're called ICOs, which is similar to an IPO where a company goes public and suddenly everyone can buy the stock. But you do it with crypto tokens and the idea was like, now you don't have to go through the SEC registration process, which is extremely challenging and onerous and helpful at preventing scams. There were celebrities who got involved in that.

At, you know, at that point, they were like, we're going to be ICO investors. But it was a pretty niche thing. Like, not that many people are that excited about ICOs or IPOs, for that matter. But then in 2020, yeah, I would say 2020 or 2021, we saw a lot of celebrities getting excited about crypto as not just a way to make money, although that certainly was a big part of it, but to sort of promote themselves and to monetize their brands. And so there were celebrity NFTs. There were celebrities getting involved in all of these Web3 projects that people were talking about. We saw like Reese Witherspoon changing her Twitter profile picture to like a world. of women NFTs. Yeah, like a lot of people

forgot about that. Not the feminist NFTs. Yeah, exactly. Basketball players were launching NFTs and, you know, celebrities, a lot of like sort of D-list, like Soldier Boy, I think. There was like a Super Bowl celebrity crypto ad one year that I remember

being like, oh, I guess this is like really a thing. Well, yeah, and that's the other part of it is that celebrities were being used to promote crypto exchanges and things like that. It was like the Crypto Super Bowl, but it was basically just before the collapse, things like really peaked with Crypto.com had an ad featuring Matt Damon. FtX had an ad with Larry David. It was like this really weird moment where like suddenly all of these celebrities were involved. NFTs kind of fell apart and have I guess been

sort of having a little bit of a revival, but I feel like the biggest trend recently has been these meme coins, which is like you don't even have to bother getting an artist involved. You just make a token with your name and then you promote it and you know it's like less work basically and you can still make a bunch of money off of it or at least that's the claim we're going to check in with mollie more later to talk about hawk coin style scam specifically but let's get back into haley welch's chaotic end to 2024 when we come back cryptua what would you do if one decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything.

Listen to shock incarceration on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up. A shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

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Like you're building a team from scratch and so the succession plan of long-term success needs to be defined. We need to embrace this community. When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier. And we watched Ottawa against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans jumping up and down. I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me. Not only was that going to be my game, but it was going to be my life. Listen to San Diego FC behind the flow. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

we all know right genius is evenly distributed opportunity is not it's black business month and black tech green money is tapping in i'm will lucas spotlighting black founders investors and innovators building the future one idea at a time let's talk legacy tech and generational wealth i don't think any person of any gender race ethnicity should alter who they are especially on an intellectual level or a talent level to make someone else who comfortable just because they are the majority in the situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to 16th minute. The Constant is the best episode of Lost. I know it's a popular opinion, but it's my opinion as well. And the best line read of all time from Lost is from season one, episode 18. Helly talks to her about Sam hearing something, and this is when she says, You're talking bait the numbers. Yes. You're talking bit the numbers.

She's so. supposed to be Australian. Shout out to Mike's Mike. And here's the moment you've all been waiting for. The Hawk to a Crypto scam. So after I saw Michael Saylor speak at the Bitcoin Conference, I have decided to start putting some money into crypto, and I just want to say, oh my God, thank you so much, Mr. Taylor.

Last week, we talked through Hayley's media career as the choice talent of Jake Paul's Sports Gambling Network Better. Healy was the host of Hawk Toll. And throughout this time, her future as a crypto girly was teased in the background. What was also teased was the fact that Haley personally did not seem to understand how crypto worked. Oh yeah, if I want a meme coin, can I give you some tokens? Yeah, I'll give you my wallet. I'll give you my wallet.

Okay. Are you sure you're going to launch? I don't know. I'm not a big of fan about meme coins. I love crypto, but you could make some money from it. There's no doubt about it. No doubt about it. I'm very new to it and I'm still learning what it is.

is. This episode of TalkToa, the penultimate ever, has Mark Cuban as a guest, the famous billionaire who's just as famously pro-Crypto. So this was the perfect opportunity for Haley and her team to tease her interest in crypto on her show. The idea of Haley somehow getting involved in crypto had been bandied about as early as her Bill Maher interview back in July. But when it's brought up with Cuban a few months later, Haley had already been teasing a pivot to the crypto space for months, both in her appearances and in her online presence. Right around November, when Trump was re-elected, Haley Welch, her team, and whoever is co-authoring these damn ex-posts starts to heavily foreshadow the eventual meme

coin that she will launch the next month. So I've been in the meme trenches for a while, and here's what I got so far in my wallet. With my busted ass fun. And once it's announced, it keeps going with sports betting bro Jake Paul. So by the time Jake Paul fights Mike Tyson on Netflix on November 15th, Haley is in the audience mask off trying to court Elon Musk in front-faced videos at the boxing match. Hi, Mr. Elon. How do I get a job at the Department of Government Efficiency? Can I lead the main team?

A few minutes later, still at the boxing match, she's talking about end. NFTs. What NF2 should I get dense? I want to go shopping after the fight. I'm so sorry, how rude of me, NF2as. And the day after her interest in naivete's surrounding crypto is teased

in the Mark Cuban episode of Talk Tua, she formally announces Hawk coin on her ex profile. Okay, y'all drop your Solano wallets. I'm giving out some main coins for free. Coming to you December 4th. And as I alluded to last week, I can't guarantee

that nothing has been deleted from her other platforms regarding this crypto launch, but it seems as if she only announced a coin on X, leaving her more relatable platforms, as it were, Instagram, TikTok, etc., empty of a mention, although, of course, Instagram stories are possible. On November 26th, more details are announced. Haley has partnered with a group called Over Here, accompanied by another truly heinous AI image, the announcement reads. Big announcement.

We're excited to partner with Haley Welch, the internet's favorite meme queen behind the viral Hock Toolgirl meme, to launch Hock, a meme coin that's set to redefine the crypto space. Why Hawk is special. This isn't just another token launch. Haley's launch of the Hock meme coin represents a meaningful step in bringing me. mainstream audiences to the crypto world. Protecting the community. With free token distributions and allow list campaigns, fans who are newcomers to crypto

will get to experience the blockchain in a safer way. You get it. This is the one meme coin that definitely isn't a scam. And they note that they're aware that a lot of Haley's audience knows nothing about crypto, so they want to make this easy as possible. Then they get to the timeline. What's next? November 26th, today, Haley officially announced the launch of Hock on X and on her podcast episode with Mark Cuban.

November 26th through December 3rd, allow list registration opened for free token claims. December 4th at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Hawk begins trading on Solana. Haley spoke to TMZ ahead of the release of Hock coin and implied that her motivation to get involved in crypto was similar to her motivation, to become an influencer in the first place. Because if she didn't do it, someone else would. And it was rumored that other people in the meme coin space already were anyways. It reminds me a lot of how part of the reason she came public as the Hocktua girl was because other people were claiming her identity falsely.

Anyways, she tells TMZ, the paper of record, that she wanted to go into crypto to combat, quote, a bunch of impostors, unquote, who'd launched their own meme coins claiming to be her. So again, this pattern of scam before you get scammed. But Haley also knows that she has to sell her fans on the idea

that Hock coin is a good investment. So she closes out the interview by pitching this as a great opportunity for the community. It's a really good way to get all my fans in community to interact and come together. Babe, Icarus, look out. Molly White tells me that as absurd as this sounds to the uninitiated, this is a pretty straightforward crypto-grift. The meme coin phenomenon is fascinating to me.

I mean, because it seems like they are relatively successful in a niche way. How? Why? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends a little bit on how you define success. They can be lucrative for the people who launch them, certainly. They are very rarely lucrative for those who buy them. You know, there is this sort of brief period of time with meme coins that, you know, they tend to follow a very similar pattern, which is they launch, they spike in price and then they crash or they crash and then they sort of peter along for a while as, you know, people lose interest. And there are a lot of people who are very excited about them because for that brief moment at the beginning, if you can generate enough interest and enough excitement around them, people look at it and they go, okay, if I can buy in early enough, I can be the person who dumps on. everybody else and makes a bunch of money.

Right. How it feels like customers are encouraged to get in on the grift of like get here early and then you can scam others just like you. Yeah, it's a very cynical model, but that is basically how it works. There are certainly some meme coins that sort of like broke containment and became more of a

mainstream crypto. So like Dogecoin is a good example of one of those. It's based around a meme, but it has a price that has not gone to zero and stayed there But most meme coins are just this sort of flash in the pan thing. And people very rarely look at them and say, this is a good business investments or this is a good long-term holding that I'm going to sell in four years and have made a tidy profit. You need to get in on the ground floor and get out as quickly as you can because you know it's going to go to zero. You know, nothing's going to be left after that. On December 3rd, the last episode of Talk Tua comes out.

Episode 12, entitled How Not to Get Canceled. And on December 4th, HawkCoin, and yes, I would agree that it should have been called Spitcoin, launches with a fair amount of dubious reception preceding it. But on X, Haley is excited. My Hawk MemeCorn is love! Writer for Fortune magazine Leo Schwartz led his piece about the crypto with the headline, Hawk to a girl, Haley Welch, launches crypto meme coin, but insists it's not a cash grab. This would not turn out to be true.

While Hock coin took off upon its launch, soaring to half a billion dollars in coin valuation during its first few hours, the scam quickly revealed itself. The crash came swiftly as crypto power users, often called snipers, abruptly picked off Hawkcoin's value. leaving basically nothing for the first-time crypto users that Haley's image was used to advertise to. And the blowback for this rug pull was swift. While the final numbers have not been confirmed, it seems that Haley's team had made somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million off of this scheme, which played out in under a day.

And Haley Welch, who we know has no experience in the crypto space, copy and pace what her crypto and legal team sends in an ex post in an attempt to curb criticism. A crypto release, which a big account called out as being 96% controlled by Haley's team in order to artificially inflate the worth of the coin. Haley's tweet denied this, leading to a delightful community note that explained that the team had been selling Hock coin to bigger investors well before the launch through pre-sales. saying the following. Haley is lying and will likely have to talk to a judge about this.

Okay, you can play the horns for that. Because of the mainstream fame that Haley had amassed throughout 2024, this news broke pretty quickly to the mainstream media as well. A viral meme coin tied to Haktua star, Haley Welch is at the center of a lawsuit. Investigators, rather investors, claim the Hock token promoted using Welch's fame wasn't properly registered as a security. The lawsuit targets the Hock token's creators and promoters, but not Welsh herself.

This kind of rugpole isn't unusual in the famously scammy meme coin space, but the scale and the mainstream popularity of its subject was unique. And because of this, one of the Internet's most prevalent crypto fraud investigators a YouTuber named Coffeezilla, a.k.a. Stephen Fendison, stay with me, confronted both Haley, over here, and Howie Mandel's villainous crypto son-in-law,

Doc Hollywood, about the obvious scam on the night of December 4th in a Twitter Spaces conversation. As 132,000 users tuned in, the Spaces conversation, which began as basically a 15-minute lecture from Doc Hollywood,

got tense pretty quickly when they opened the floor for questions. I have questions. I have questions. I'm raising my hand. Hey, guys. What copy Zilla? Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I've ever seen in my life. Okay, then why the fuck are you on?

Okay, it's not going well. Anyways, here's Doc Hollywood. Profiting from the rug pool, I think it's relevant. We didn't pull a rug. I don't know what you're trying to say. It's not true. That's defamation. Doc, do the math.

Do the math. You're saying that we pulled a rug. There was no wrong. You're defaming. Are you not going to let me talk? You just talk over me. You talk over me. I'm hearing bullshit.

Now, what Doc Hollywood does not know is that CoffeeZilla was showing up to this conversation with notes. He presses on the good doctor about why Hawk coin had been marketed at fans of Haley's who had never invested in crypto before. These are people that are outside. side of crypto that we're going to be onboarding. And they don't give a shit. They don't even know what a market cap is. They just go, oh, cool, free coin. Now I get to join a community. Cool. Done. In his video, Coffeezilla also explains that he had acquired their initial pitch deck for Hawk coin, where the scam is all but encoded into the plan. From one slide. Hawk will unite Haley's global fan base, enabling fans to connect with each other through the talk to a

podcast and social media. This token redefines meme coin by offering a new class of consumer crypto. Okay, pitch deck. Let's do the for dummies version. Next slide. Hock will onboard normies, non-crypto users, by linking to Web2 social media, making it easy for Haley's fans to create wallets via social login and claim free tokens. Oh, so they're willing to admit they are intentionally targeting a naive market.

Suffice it to say that like scams before it, it appears that Haley's team designed the coin to make a shitload of money for themselves up front and then fuck anyone who is naive enough to buy it when they're profiting inevitably made the value of the coin crash. But even before KofiZilla entered the chat, the night that the coin launched, the team was already on the defensive. While it's normal for a crypto rugpole to happen quickly, it was like, still rare for it to have happened in the space of a single day, and none of the legalese that Haley and Company sharded out in their own defense was particularly convincing.

And while Confizilla was the journalist to most explicitly break the scam down, the whole crypto world was pissed about this from the moment the token was announced and encouraged those who had been scammed to seek legal protection. This is a tweet from a firm called Berwick Law, who end up becoming a major player in this story. If you lost money on Hawk, contact our firm to learn about your legal rights. Our firm represents thousands of NFT and token investors in securities matters. This is attorney advertising. And while by all accounts, this crypto scam is very commonplace.

What makes it stand out is, as Coffee Zilla said, it's targeting of first-time crypto users in order to rip them off. the mainstream nature of the meme personality, and honestly, how flagrant Doc Hollywood comes off in this call with Coffeezilla, which went viral several times over, and I think rightfully so. Howie Mandel's son-in-law calls the people who invested in his crypto coin mentally ill. Most of you, we don't want you in the community. Let's be real, right? You're not great people. I don't know, y'all, right?

I see some friendly faces in this audience. He's having a meltdown. You know, I'm going to say y'all, you guys, right? There's a lot of negativity in the space. I think crypto brings the mentally ill into this thing, right? If you guys are in crypto, you're most likely mentally ill. And I'm going to count myself as mentally ill for even being here right now. So no one can look more unhinged than Dr. Shob is here.

but Haley Welch obviously is not coming off well in this call either. She barely says anything because she didn't orchestrate this scam. She just represents it. In a moment that is iconic, you can't deny it, at some point in this contentious conversation between a man who identifies as Coffee Zilla and a man who identifies as Doc Hollywood arguing about their make-believe computer money,

Haley's fight or flight instinct seems to kick in. And since she doesn't know enough about crypto to fight a journalist who specializes in crypto, she gets the fuck out of there in the funniest way possible, interrupting a different journalist while doing so. Hey guys, I hate to interrupt you, Nick. Well, hello there. But anywho, I'm going to go to bed, and I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Okay. She goes full cartoon chipmuck mode. She gets the fuck out of there, and the Twitter Spaces Press conference ends. And believe it or not, that was the last we heard from Haley Welch personally for weeks. But as always, Haley ducking out of the spotlight didn't make much of a difference. The people who had gotten ripped off in the meme coin scam were justifiably pissed. And a lot of other online users seemed to relish in her fall for a main character who they felt had overstayed her welcome. and maybe didn't even deserve the attention she'd gotten in the first place.

After the CoffeeZilla video, called Exposing the Hawk to a Scam, took off the day after the rugpole, the media attention around Haley, Doc Hollywood, and Hawk coin skyrocketed. And Haley's publicist, you might remember he is the same publicist who represents Bruce Springsteen, messaged CoffeeZilla after that Twitter space's fiasco, telling him that Haley was essentially paid to promote the token instead of orchestrating the scheme, going on to say that she received $125,000 for promoting it. When CoffeeZilla asked if Haley would see a cut of this pre-sale money or the scummy $3 million

fees that he had confronted the crypto team with, the publicist said that after expenses were recouped, Haley was supposed to have gotten 50% of net proceeds from the cost. but that that agreement hadn't been finalized yet. But Coffeezilla felt, and I agree, that this is extremely vague and does not specify if Haley Welch would get these scam proceeds to the tune of $1.5 million if the crypto team managed to get away with this. I don't know. I think this whole situation is terrible and she should feel bad.

I hope she does, really, because she got in bed with her. these people who clearly saw dollar signs, she saw dollar signs, and they did this and people have been hurt. But here's the thing. We don't really know how Haley feels about any of this. Maybe because she doesn't care to say, or maybe because she's kind of muzzled because of the legal risk that saying anything could have, especially in an industry she never had much of a grip on. Understandably, the internet went nuts with the whole, I'm going to go to bed moment, and then came the lawsuit. Although at the time of this writing, it is just the crypto team that's being sued, not Haley Welch herself. On December 19th, Berwick Law, remember them, sued the distributor

for the coin, the promoters for the coin, and thankfully, someone finally had the good sense to sue Doc motherfucking Hollywood. And probably expectedly, when this lawsuit was filed on behalf of the people who had been scammed, Over Here and Doc Hollywood turned on each other abruptly. In a tweet, Over Here said that it was the Doc who controlled all the fees and token decisions, not them. And to the public's delight, Haley Welch appeared to wake up from that nap of hers a little over two weeks later on December 20th, posting what is at the time of this recording her final tweet. I take this situation extremely seriously and want to address my fans, the investors who have been affected in the broader community. I'm fully cooperating with and I am committed to

assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted, as well as to help uncover the truth. Hold the responsible parties accountable and resolve the matter. If you have experienced losses related to this, please contact Berwick Law using the link below. And while Haley continues to repost memes on TikTok, the last we really hear from her as a personality is an unrelated post on Instagram from late December, which shows pictures from a trip to Hawaii she took with Chelsea Bradford, her best friend.

They're kind of the Bonnie and Clyde of internet fame. They're just riding it out to the bitter end. At present, the case hasn't been decided. but the public's response to seeing these scammers painted into a corner was universally positive. And this positive reception seems to have empowered Berwick Law to push even further into the crypto-scam space. On January 16th, just a couple weeks ago, Wired reported that the same firm was suing pump. fun, the site that made it so easy to run meme coin scams in the first place. And for the moment, that's where Haley's story ends.

There's been a lot of disagreement on whether Doc Hollywood and company will experience any meaningful legal consequence for this. But what we do know is that Haley Welch herself doesn't seem to be legally on the hook for anything. At least not right now. It seems like maybe she just went back to bed. And when we come back, Molly White's take on what this shit show says about the few. future of crypto. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are shorthy.

short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club. We go behind the scenes and explore the stories of those involved. San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team. We need veteran players and we need young players.

Like, you're building a team from scratch. And so the succession plan of long-term success needs to be defined. We need to embrace this community. When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier. And we watched Badaway against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans jumping up and down. I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me. Not only was that going to be my game, but it was going to be my life. Listen to San Diego FC behind the flow.

Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are,

especially on an intellectual level or a talent level to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, Listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. I did it too. And today, we are with deepest regrets ending our Hocktua series

by discussing the incredible speed run of our main character of 2024, Haley Welch. To close out this episode, here's the rest of Molly White and my talk. She's the writer behind Web3 is going just great, citation needed, and is a prolific Wikipedia editor, a legend. And so I wanted to ask her not just what she thinks, thought of the Hock coin scam, but what this means for the future of these kinds of grifts. Because I don't know if you've noticed, but the sitting American president seems thrilled about them. Here's our talk.

Which brings us to Haktua and Hock coin, I believe it is. As the summer went on, I was observing Haley Welch's journey, I'm curious because it sort of escalated to this recent crypto grift. Are there certain things to like look out for, are there warning signs that a viral star is going to start a cryptogrift before the grift is announced? Well, I wouldn't say there always are, but there certainly were with Haley Welch because, you know, I heard of her around the time the original meme went viral and then I forgot about her. And then the next time I heard about her was in July when she turned up to the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville and was like rubbing elbows with RFK Jr. all of a sudden. And people

were like, oh, my God, the Haktua girl is at the Bitcoin conference. And I was like, oh, no. Here we go. You know, and she had by that point, I think maybe started her podcast and was, you know, clearly trying to make her 15 minutes, 15 seconds of fame, I guess, into this bigger brand and, you know, make it into maybe a lucrative, I don't know if career is the word, but certainly, you know, make some money off of it. And that is always a sign that, you know, know, meme coins may be in the future. And then certainly once they start hanging out in the crypto worlds, you probably could have bet, bet easy money on that that she would eventually get to this. For me, the red flag was the association with the Paul brothers. They only have bad

ideas. And they have a long history of crypto scams as well. I mean, they've been in that since the ground floor, basically offloading NFTs and things like that on their fans. Going up to the actual grift, can you walk me through how this was done and what, if anything, differentiates the hawktoa grift from another crypto grift? Yeah, so there's kind of a handful of ways that people start meme coins. It's become very easy to do so over the last year or so because there have been these platforms, including one that's called pump. dot fun, which is like a very popular platform where anyone can launch a meme coin in a matter of minutes. And it's really sort of reduced the sort of technical barrier to entry that previously existed and has certainly helped to fuel this explosion in meme coins where it seems

like, you know, something happens and suddenly there's 20 meme coins based around it within a span of minutes. Because, you know, the sort of point is to get as much media attention as possible. And so if you can be the first person to sort of glom on to a viral moment, then you can potentially make money, or at least that's the theory. It feels more like it's a like PR challenge more than anything else. Oh, for sure. That's 100% the case. And so the way that, you know, celebrity meme coins work is a little bit varied because often it's not the celebrities themselves, you know, sitting down at a computer and designing this token. There's often some sort of a partnership with supposedly experienced people in this world. who are the ones designing the tokenomics, which is what they like to call the sort of distribution schemes and things like that.

People who speak the language of the crypto world have made quite a lot of money off of sort of offering to be a conduit for celebrities and take all of the hard stuff off of their plate, basically. And all they have to do is endorse it and promote it on Twitter and take their cut at the end of the day. And that seems to be what happened here with the Haktua girl where, you know, she was not the one. one on Pump. Fun, you know, typing in the parameters and all that. But she was working with this group of promoters who promised to sort of help her with the hard stuff. Is there a particularly reason why she is being singled out and called out if this happens all the time? I mean, I would argue that probably more people should be singled out and called out about these types of things. Yeah, because her particular grift was, I think,

not particularly unique. It's not clear to me that she is personally culpable. in a way that more meme coin creators may be. But she has certainly been a fun target for a lot of people who are angry about, you know, this particular scam. But I think a lot of it is really just the jokes. You know, it's fun to make jokes about Hoc2a girl. And, you know, she's been sort of portrayed as this villain because it's kind of funny to say that like Huck toa girl just stole all your money in ways that maybe it's not with just any general meme coin. What was done here is so clearly a scam and is so clearly wrong. but I just wasn't sure if it was uniquely wrong or if this is the playbook.

Yeah, I was actually just talking to someone about this where in the crypto world, things like this happen so often that I think people often forget that they're illegal. Pumpenups are actually like illegal thing to do. Wash trading, which is where you sort of fake buying and selling of tokens to increase the price and to sort of make it look more popular than it is, that's illegal. but it's so common in the crypto world and it's so rarely enforced that it has become this accepted way

of doing business in the crypto world. That's sort of what we're seeing here where like, yeah, pumping and dumping is illegal, rug pulling is illegal. It's also an everyday occurrence. And the two things are not sort of mutually exclusive. I think you see that a lot with even when it comes to enforcement cases

and legal action where people are like, I can't believe you're singling out Kim Kardashian in or something like that. Because what she's doing is so common, you know, when she, she was targeted by the SEC because she was doing paid promotions for crypto tokens without disclosing she was being compensated. But like, if you look at crypto Twitter, that's all you're seeing. That's everyday stuff. And so it almost feels unfair to be targeted for that when it's so rarely enforced. And honestly, you could probably make an argument that it is unfair. But part of the regulatory regime is trying to sort of make an example of that.

of people to try to deter others from doing similar activity. And so that's why you tend to see these legal actions coming out against the Kim Kardashians of the world and not some no-name cryptos scammer. Are cases like this an opportunity to set a higher precedent? Do you see cases like this altering the types of grifts we're going to see? I suspect not with this one. For one, I would be kind of surprised if legal action comes of it. I know some people have speculated that like, oh, a talk to a girl is going to jail.

And again, it's a part of the joke, and it's a funny idea. But in the grand scheme of meme coin disasters, this one was pretty small. Again, it's not clear to me how much intent Haley Welch herself had around scamming her fans beyond the sort of normal amount of scam that's involved with meme coins. I don't necessarily expect the SEC to, like, come out and make a big example of Haley Welch, especially right now with political changes and regulatory changes that are looking to even further decrease how many enforcement cases the SEC brings against crypto projects.

And so I suspect that this is all a fun laugh, and I don't think it will really meaningfully change how many people start these projects. In fact, I suspect there are people out there looking at Haley Welch and going, hmm, maybe I could do something like this. Should I give it a shot? Right. Sort of an all publicity is good publicity.

aspect to this as well. And I think that it should probably be a lesson to celebrities who are considering getting involved with this. I'm sure many celebrities have received outreach from these types of people who work with celebrities to launch meme coins who probably don't pitch this as a scam to the celebrities. You know, they use all the talking points about how this is a great way to engage with your fans and to create a community around your meme coin. And it might be attempting to some celebrities who are not familiar with this, but ultimately, they're running the risk of being branded as a scammer. Most of these things, even if they don't collapse quite as spectacularly as this one, are still pretty naked cash grabs. And so I don't think it's something

that many people who are trying to maintain any form of legitimate reputation would necessarily want to get involved with. Yeah. I mean, a podcast is one thing, although still offensive. But it's so funny that, yeah, now it's like, oh, the best way to engage with your fans is to create a new kind of money and make them buy it. I guess the one thing that I try to point out when it comes to meme coins like this is, you know, the people who are looking at them and saying maybe I can be the one who gets in early, maybe I can be the one who makes a killing off of this when it spikes by a thousand percent before it completely crashes. It's important to realize that in the crypto world, for many people, it is literally not possible to get in early. early enough to make money on these things. There's this whole ecosystem of bots and it's called token sniping where, you know, there's all this infrastructure out there that is fairly sophisticated people doing the same

thing you're trying to do sitting at your computer watching Twitter. And so getting the idea that you are going to be the one who gets in early enough to profit off of this is a very dangerous idea because it's, you're trading against people who are, despite the fact that they're trading meme coins, relatively. sophisticated in this type of thing. And when it comes to meme coin markets, but certainly crypto markets more broadly, I think a lot of people tend to look at them as somewhat similar to stock markets and sort of other highly regulated trading venues. And that is also often a mistake because you really should not be putting trust into even the exchanges where you're

trading, the people you're trading against, the platforms that are supposedly helping you to do these trading because there is, like I said, just such a failure of the regulatory apparatus to maintain these legitimate and sort of safe markets for retail investors to trade in. So I'm always cautious about, you know, talking about these things in a way that might give people the impression that like, ooh, you know, maybe I can be the one who makes the killing off of this because it's stacked against you in ways that people often don't realize. Thank you so much to Molly. You can follow all her work and Web3 is going just great at the

the links in the description. And here we find ourselves at the end of the HocTua series. Is this purgatory? Have we been dead the whole time? The whole time, the whole time, you would... The whole time! Is the only useful lesson here. Never trust Gizmo's son-in-law.

Maybe. But ironically enough, I think it is this same son-in-law, Doc Hollywood himself, that has the key to not only what the victims of the crypto scam believe, But what I think probably motivated Haley Welch to become a part of this scheme in the first place. The people here, you guys are already f***ed. Y'all are fissioned every day thinking everything's a scam. And you know what? You guys are right. Everything is a scam. But not this. Not this. You're right. Everything's a scam. But not this.

Contained in the words of this coked out freak is an insight into online culture today. The days where someone would be surprised to be taken advantage of online are long gone. To some extent, it's an expectation of being online. It's the rules of play. So why are so many people still getting scammed? I think it's because of what Doc Hollywood is saying. A good scammer can convince you that, sure, everything is a scam. Just not this.

Why is this normal girl from Tennessee using her image to run? rip off people just like her. People in a position that she herself would have been in just six months earlier. I don't know for sure, but I can say that it feels pretty nihilistic in the way that a lot of American culture is. Here is this young woman that went viral after being coerced into creating content for someone else outside of a bar. She panics for a week, then seems to realize that while this isn't what she wanted, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. She's grown up on the internet, she's seen this happen to people before, and she knows that if she doesn't try to capitalize on this, someone else is going to. They've already

started. She's grown up poor. She's witnessed the American scam firsthand. The only way you die above the class you were born in now is for something extraordinary to happen. And sure, some people strike it big professionally in a way that helps and enriches the lives of others, but if you're trying to do it quick, probably not. Again, none of this justifies financially extorting other people, but I do think it contextualizes it. But when the shine wears off of this initial moment, maybe the podcast is a little amateurish.

Maybe the public seems to be moving on from the meme. She seems to say, fuck it. Maybe it's possible to be convinced by the bad actors you've surrounded yourself with, the Doc Hollywoods and the Jake Pauls, that you can get a solid cash out on your way out the door of relevance, that becoming the scammer is how you really jump classes. Because for all intents and purposes, that's true. All she has to do is convince the people she's scamming that they're the scammers too.

I am honestly really curious where Haley Welch goes from here, if anywhere, in the influencing space specifically. But if this is it, I think Haley ended up getting caught between the scammers and the scammed. Because yes, she absolutely used and monetized her image to rip off a lot of people who had not gotten lucky in the same way that she had. But it's just as undeniable to me that she was exploited and deceived by the people surrounding her more than once. First, by the guys who posted the clip of her without explicit permission, who then yelled at her publicly for not cutting them in on her success. Then, with the management that often openly acknowledged that they knew she was seen as a sexual object and that that made her uncomfortable, the same management who openly said that they didn't think she was smart enough, understand what real Hollywood representation would mean.

You don't need to feel bad for her, but Haley absolutely got scammed here, too. Because even if she's not the one getting sued, she's the one who gets discarded. In her first national interview, a thousand years ago, all the way back in July 2024, from that piece. They all think they know so much about me, Shikintin News, but nobody knows shit about me. Do you want them to, I ask? Well, shoots a devious smile. Don't worry. They will before it's over with.

Haley Welch, the Hawk to a Girl. Your 16th minute ends now. I hope for your sake. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened to this series. Please tell your damn friends about it for crying out loud. And next week, we will return with a real mystery. One that collides the classic exploratory weirdo internet community of Lost Media and Creepypasta fans.

The Backrooms next week on 16th Minute. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Hard Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Laughness. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. voice acting is from Grant Crater And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson

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The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in a lot. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to money and wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.