When you think of a hardened crypto criminal, you might imagine a hooded young man hunched over a\u00a0laptop.<\/p>\n
But recent headlines prove that the digital assets space is an equal opportunities employer of sorts\u200a\u2014\u200awith no shortage of women falling afoul of the\u00a0law.<\/p>\n
Some may have fallen into illicit activities accidentally, while there\u2019s little doubt others very much knew what they were\u00a0doing.<\/p>\n
Take Haliey Welch as an example. She\u2019s best known for becoming an overnight celebrity after drunkenly uttering the phrase \u201chawk tuah\u201d into a microphone.<\/p>\n
Not content with rolling out her own range of merchandise and a podcast, Welch has now reached the pinnacle of the attention economy by unveiling a memecoin.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/medium.com\/media\/e6dae7cbd4ae2d3624b3587bf9a15f3e\/href<\/a><\/p>\n HAWK\u2019s launch was nothing short of a disaster, with its market cap pumping and dumping faster than you can say \u201c15 minutes of\u00a0fame.\u201d<\/p>\n Community Notes warning investors have been slapped on several of Welch\u2019s X posts about the doomed\u00a0project.<\/p>\n And a live Spaces stream as she tried to mitigate the damage was so inflammatory that the recording was hastily\u00a0deleted.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t help that Coffeezilla\u200a\u2014\u200aa YouTuber renowned for investigating crypto scams\u200a\u2014\u200atook to the stage and denounced HAWK for having \u201cthe worst tokenomics he\u2019s ever\u00a0seen.\u201d<\/p>\n https:\/\/medium.com\/media\/e14d1b6a7b79564b1ead692e138d9818\/href<\/a><\/p>\n While Welch had posted enthusiastically about crypto, and attended a few conferences, it seems unlikely that a 22-year-old suddenly catapulted into the spotlight would, or could, mastermind such a\u00a0scheme.<\/p>\n In fact, on the Spaces, it was a platform called overHere\u200a\u2014\u200aand an account named Doc Hollywood\u200a\u2014\u200athat ended up doing most of the\u00a0talking.<\/p>\n \u201cHawk Tuah girl,\u201d once a prolific poster to 2.6 million followers on Instagram and 422,000 on X, has now gone quiet amid a barrage of negative news headlines.<\/p>\n And even if her role in the execution of this meme-coin was pretty limited, she could end up bearing many of the consequences.<\/p>\n Agencies like the SEC have been known to sit up and take notice when incidents like this have happened in the past, but the arrival of a more relaxed regulatory landscape under Donald Trump may mean action isn\u2019t taken\u00a0here.<\/p>\n But that wouldn\u2019t stop Welch from being named in a class action lodged by aggrieved investors, with one firm already urging those whose fingers were burned by HAWK to get in\u00a0touch.<\/p>\n https:\/\/medium.com\/media\/8df91bed98a518076c71f829f7437262\/href<\/a><\/p>\n The scandal engulfing Welch, which could irreparably damage the goodwill shown to her by online fans, is the latest in a long line of controversies.<\/p>\n Also this week, a woman was unmasked as the leader of a multibillion-dollar Russian money laundering network relied on by hackers and criminal gangs, amid allegations Tether was widely used in its operations.<\/p>\n Ekaterina Zhdanova has been sanctioned by the U.S. and is accused of funnelling funds for oligarchs\u200a\u2014\u200aas well as handling crypto stolen from ransomware.<\/p>\n And last month, Heather Morgan\u200a\u2014\u200aan amateur rapper also known as \u201cRazzlekhan\u201d and \u201cThe Crocodile of Wall Street\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200awas sentenced to 18 months behind bars for helping launder more than 120,000 BTC stolen from Bitfinex.<\/p>\n The stories of female criminals in this industry has long attracted intrigue, with the disappearance of OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova<\/a>, often referred to as \u201cCryptoqueen,\u201d being turned into a hit\u00a0podcast.<\/p>\n Girls just wanna have\u00a0funds.<\/p>\n Girls Just Wanna Have Funds: Female Crypto Criminals Make News<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From a viral meme sensation to a sophisticated money launderer helping Russia\u2019s elite, it isn\u2019t just men in the upper echelons of alleged crypto\u00a0crimes. When you think of a hardened crypto criminal, you might imagine a hooded young man hunched over a\u00a0laptop. But recent headlines prove that the digital assets space is an equal opportunities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}