Hailey Welch AKA Hawk Tuah Girl has finally broken her silence in a leaked episode of her podcast after the controversy surrounding her cryptocoin angered fans a few weeks ago,
If anyone was wondering what happened to Hailey "Hawk Tuah Girl" Welch, it's fair to say the viral sensation has been lying low for a while. There's something ironic about the fact the most recent video on her YouTube channel is called "How to avoid getting canceled", but in the aftermath of the cryptocurrency catastrophe, Welch is seemingly here to set the record straight.
Welch originally found fame in June 2024 when she took over the internet with her "spit on that thang" catchphrase. Instead of getting her 15 seconds of fame as a TikTok trend, Welch tried to expand her horizons with a podcast, dating app, and short-lived attempt to 'coin' the meme coin market.
Hawk Tuah Girl announced $HAWK in November 2024, and in a post-election boom where Bitcoin was soaring, it looked like Welch was onto a winner. Of course, the recent discourse around Donald and Melania Trump has shown that many think of meme coins as little more than gambling.
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Welch found this out the hard way, with her being accused of misleading investors and promoting a 'pump and dump' cryptocurrency scheme that some people say lost their life savings.
Hawk Tuah and her team botched the aftermath, her Wikipedia was hijacked, and she's now remembered for her new catchphrase, "Anywho, I'm going to go to bed and I'll see you guys tomorrow," after she dipped out of a discussion about what went wrong.
Now, a leaked episode of her Talk Tuah podcast has made it online, where Welch lays it all out for FaZe Clan's Richard "Ricky" Bengston. Better known as Banks, the FaZe Clan founder says, “It’s all gonna be OK,” but reminds her she’ll likely be haunted by this for the rest of her days.
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Welch maintains that she was sold the idea of $HAWK being a long-term coin that was going to "change the way everybody thinks about crypto."
As well as saying her boyfriend (Pookie) lost money in $HAWK, a genuinely sorry-looking Welch says: "I feel really bad for all the people that got affected by it. And it just didn’t go the way I planned."
In terms of what went wrong, she says she made the mistake of trusting a 'friend of a friend'. Adding that the guy was 'a little bit weird' on the day that $HAWK launched, she admitted: "I probably should have looked into him a little bit more."
Banks points to how an apparent $125,000 has been made from $HAWK, suggesting that Welch can make things right by market buying back the meme coin and locking it up as a gesture of goodwill. Still, she added: "I dunno, I'm scared to touch that coin."
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The podcast points to how Logan Paul was caught in his own crypto scandal, but as they remind Welch, he tried to make it good by paying it back.
Unfortunately for Welch, things are set to go from bad to worse. Banks said he had strict stipulations before agreeing to do the talk, namely that the video couldn't be leaked ahead of time in hopes of preventing market manipulation.
Summing up the entire debacle, Banks posted: "Poor girl, it’s a wonder how she found herself in this position in the first place."