Why do people keep suing celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo and Tom Brady over cryptocurrency losses?

Author: Lucas Alpert

Multiple class-action lawsuits have been filed against top cryptocurrency endorsers such as Steph Curry and Larry David. Nearly all of these cases were filed by the same Miami attorney.

Lawsuits have continued since the cryptocurrency crash last year.

But a series of class-action lawsuits against celebrity endorsers of cryptocurrency exchanges such as FTX and Binance, all filed by the same group of attorneys in South Florida, have piled up in Miami federal court.

The latest lawsuit accuses global soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo of allegedly promoting a “mass solicitation for investment in unregistered securities” sold by Binance. Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, was fined $4 billion last week after admitting to violating bank secrecy laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, centers on Ronaldo’s role in a global marketing campaign launched in 2022 for a series of Binance NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, that were a A blockchain-backed art form designed to be ephemeral and popular.

Ronaldo’s representatives did not immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.

Monday’s lawsuit against Ronaldo joins similar class-action lawsuits that include Major League Baseball, Formula 1, Mercedes-Benz (XE:MBG) (MBGYY) and advertising giants Dentsu and Wasserman, which Created much of the content for FTX’s global promotions.

Messages left with representatives for Major League Baseball, Formula 1, Mercedes, Dentsu and Wasserman were not immediately returned.

The lawsuits are the latest in a series of class-action lawsuits that began last year against celebrity endorsers of failed cryptocurrency exchanges such as Voyager and FTX, in which customers lost billions of dollars in deposits.

Over the past 18 months, a group of Florida attorneys led by Adam Moskowitz has sued Tom Brady, Gisele Bunchen on behalf of investors who lost money in the cryptocurrency crash. Paid endorsers such as Gisele Böndchen, Shaquille O’Neal, Mark Cuban and others filed lawsuits. Shohei Ohtani, Larry David, Stephen Curry and Naomi Osaka.

“All of these celebrities were paid hundreds of millions of dollars directly from customer deposits,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “Some of the most prominent and richest groups in the world may now have their hands on $20 billion worth of crypto assets. Responsible for currency collapse and the largest financial scandal in U.S. history.”

Moskowitz joins Mark Migdal & Hayden and Boies Schiller and Flexner, led by prominent litigator David Boies Lawyers from the law firm involved in the lawsuit are seeking at least $5 billion in damages from those who helped promote the cryptocurrency exchange.

Last year’s case is still ongoing, and the celebrities named have been fighting the claims in court.

Moskowitz, who specializes in class action lawsuits, said the issues surrounding cryptocurrencies first came to his attention more than two years ago, before the entire market collapsed, when he came to believe that the special tokens minted by each exchange amounted to unregistered securities.

He first filed suit against Voyager early last year, when the exchange collapsed and the SEC began filing lawsuits against many in the industry, accusing them of trading unregistered securities. “That’s when what we were doing started to gain traction,” Moskowitz said.

He said a series of favorable court rulings helped move his case forward and allowed him to spearhead such action.

In a separate class-action lawsuit filed earlier this year, Moskowitz and his partners sued a group of YouTube financial influencers for their role in promoting FTX, accusing them of receiving cash for uncritically praising the exchange.

Moskowitz said several of the lawsuits have been settled, but others are ongoing.

-Lucas Alpert

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23rd 11th 1817

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