A group of high-profile YouTubers is facing a class-action lawsuit from FTX investors who allege influencers promoted an allegedly fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange.
In addition to promoting FTX, the content creators also allegedly promoted the exchange’s Yield Accounts (YBAs), which the lawsuit alleges are unregistered securities. The class-action lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Miami, Florida, accuses some well-known YouTube influencers of promoting FTX’s YBA to their millions of followers, without disclosing how much the exchange paid them.
“Evidence has now been uncovered to suggest that influencers played a major role in the FTX disaster, and in fact FTX would not have been able to reach such heights without the enormous influence of these influencers, who hyped deceitful FTX platform for hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed payments ranging from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars in bribes" The lawsuit is led by Edwin Garrison, a US citizen and Oklahoma resident, and other plaintiffs from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. These people have YBA accounts with FTX.
Influencers involved in the lawsuit include Kevin Paffrath, Brian Jung, Graham Stephan, Ben Armstrong (commonly known as "Bitboy"), Tom Nash, and Erika Kullberg, believed to be the founder of talent management firm Creators Agency, also named in a lawsuit defendant. According to the lawsuit, Paffrath, Stephan and Nash deleted all "supporting FTX and praising Sam Bankman-Fried" videos on their YouTube channel after the platform crashed, and instead posted an apology video, acknowledging their involvement in hyping the crashed cryptocurrency exchange and The resulting losses are worth billions of dollars to investors.
As previously reported by CryptoPotato, National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Shaquille O’Neal and Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka may be immune from a FTX lawsuit that accuses sports stars and other celebrities of promoting FTX to investors with little crypto knowledge .
Other notables involved in the FTX lawsuit include Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Trevor Lawrence, and Kevin O'Leary. Shortly after FTX collapsed in November 2022, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Golden State Warriors, alleging that the San Francisco professional basketball team promoted FTX as a safe platform for investing in cryptocurrencies.
