Nearly six months have passed since the FTX scandal began, and it has recently been revealed that Taylor Swift was close to getting involved. It was reported that the singer avoided signing a $100 million sponsorship deal with the cryptocurrency company due to Swift doing her due diligence.
On Dec 2022, the Financial Times reported that the company was in talks with Swift for a potential “nine-figure” partnership. The company’s marketing team has admitted that they were against the collaboration, stating that it was “too expensive.” Some of the discussions involved included creating NFT tokens for Swift’s single “Anti-Hero.” This negotiation happened months before the company went bankrupt.
It was revealed during an interview on The Scoop podcast that the reason the deal fell through was because Swift asked the company about “unregistered securities.” Adam Moskowitz, a lawyer handling the class action lawsuit, revealed that Swift was the only celebrity to see if the company was “selling unregistered securities.”
“The one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift. In our discovery, Taylor Swift actually asked them, ‘Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?’”
A handful of celebrities, such as Shaquille O’Neal and Trevor Lawrence, have promoted the crypto company. Now, these celebrities have been targeted for a class action lawsuit due to accusations of promoting the sale of unregistered securities. The lawyer was also shocked that a handful of celebrities who promoted the FTX didn’t do their due diligence and believed that they should be liable for the damages.
“You promote an unregistered security for financial benefit, you are liable for all the rescissory damages.
“I mean, why would you possibly promote cryptocurrency if it may be an unregistered security? That’s just baffling to me. “There’s a long list of influencers that promoted this. But you know, you’ve got to be realistic. I mean, I can’t go after 1,000 right now. So you go after the largest ones.”
This revelation shocked the tech industry, including Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, who praised the singer for making a smart decision and suggested she has learned well from her father, a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas after the company filed for bankruptcy protection. Since the scandal, countless investors have lost millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the value of crypto has heavily declined, with Bitcoin sinking to its lowest price in two years. Since FTX’s collapse, both the Bahamas and the United States have launched investigations. The CEO pled not guilty to the charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the US and violate campaign finance laws.
A judge has set a trial date for Bankman-Fried on Oct. 2, 2023. As for the influencer class action lawsuit, celebrities have been served with official notices, though it was revealed that serving O’Neal tended to be the most difficult.