There have been plenty of class-action lawsuits against various of celebrities for promoting cryptocurrency that soon lost its value. Several more were launched in the southern district of Florida this week, with Major League Baseball, Formula 1, Mercedes Benz and ad companies Dentsu and Wasserman targeted for their promotion of now-bankrupt exchange FTX, and with soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo targeted for his promotion of rival Binance. The suit against Ronaldo stands out for it targeting a different exchange, and for the massive sum of money listed:
Full story https://t.co/x2fM3nyKfD
— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) November 29, 2023
Here’s more from that BBC story:
In November 2022, Binance announced its first “CR7” collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in partnership with Ronaldo, which the footballer said would reward fans “for all the years of support”.
..In a social media video announcing the partnership, Ronaldo told would-be investors “we are going to change the NFT game and take football to the next level”.
…The cheapest NFT from the collection was priced at $77 when it went on sale in November 2022 – but one year later, it was priced at about $1.
…SEC chair Gary Gensler previously said celebrities must “disclose to the public from whom and how much you are getting paid to promote investment in securities”.
“When celebrities endorse investment opportunities, including crypto-asset securities, investors should be careful to research if the investments are right for them, and they should know why celebrities are making those endorsements,” he said.
As discussed, there have been tons of celebrities targeted in these kinds of lawsuits over crypto promotion, with many of them filed by a group of south Florida lawyers led by Adam Moskowitz. Some of those listed from the sports world to date have included Shaquille O’Neal (finally served in May after a lot of drama), Mark Cuban, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Shohei Ohtani, Larry David, Steph Curry and Naomi Osaka.
But most of those have been about FTX. And that makes sense, as that company was heavily into sports endorsements. Author Michael Lewis (who covered FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in recent book Going Infinite) has frequently talked about the company’s strategy of paying sports figures huge money to promote their product to sports fans. So it’s quite interesting to see a lawsuit like this about Binance, especially with this sum of money listed and with this coming a week after that platform’s CEO Changpeng Zhao stepped down amidst news of the exchange agreeing to pay $4.3 billion in U.S. Treasury Department fines for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and more. And despite all that, Ronaldo is still tweeting about doing more with Binance:
Cooking something up with @binance https://t.co/FMAP5GAdxE
— Cristiano Ronaldo (@Cristiano) November 28, 2023
So we’ll see what happens with this. Ronaldo was estimated to be the world’s highest-paid athlete (making $136 million) by Forbes earlier this year, but even at that level, $1 billion seems like a lot to target him for. But it’s interesting to see this lawsuit against Ronaldo for his Binance involvement, and to see Ronaldo still vowing to do more with the company.
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