In her first sit-down interview since the collapse of the Hawk Tuah memecoin, Haliey Welch spoke to Channel 5’s Andrew Callaghan about how she ended up with her name on a coin she says she never controlled.
Welch was direct about how she ended up involved. “I got talked into doing something that I didn’t know anything about really,” she told Callaghan. The person who brought the idea to her, she said, came through a loose personal connection.
She continued: “He was introduced from a friend of a friend, if that makes sense.” She declined to name him on camera, but confirmed he was one of the large-scale crypto figures who circulates through influencer circles building coins off their audiences.
The pitch, she explained, was framed around charity and community. “This is going to be so much money. You can donate half of it. You’ll have it for your charity… You can get to know your community. Your fans can interact with you.
“That’s technically the way it got used and brought to me,” she said. “I was like, you know what, that is a really good idea. But it did not turn out like that at all.”
On the day the coin launched, Welch was in California recording podcasts. She described watching the man operating the coin grow increasingly anxious in real time.
“We noticed he was like pacing around everywhere, like nervous. And I was like, is that normal? Why is he acting like that? Because, you know, I’m doing a podcast. I’m not controlling the coin,” she stated.
When the recordings wrapped, the mood in the room shifted. “Everybody just kind of went out of the room and they looked concerned and I was like, what is going on? They’re like, oh, nothing, you ain’t got to worry about it,” she recalled.
She pulled up TikTok and immediately saw the headlines. She mentioned: “The next thing I know, oh yeah, Haliey Welch is going to jail. And I was like, what did I do? Why am I going to jail?”
She was firm that her role was limited to lending her name and face. “I did not control the coin myself. I’m not smart enough to do that. I don’t know anything about it. You have your face on it, your name on it, and then somebody else runs it. I didn’t have any part in it, but everybody and their mama thinks I did,” she stated.
She added that the person running the coin had brought in outside help to manage the launch. She mentioned: “I think he bit off more than he could chew, so he hired somebody to help him that he knew of and just didn’t know a whole lot about, and then he screwed us really bad.”
Regarding the financial losses, Welch acknowledged that real money was lost by real people. “I think 200,000 of real people’s money got lost and then the rest of it was like scammers and stuff like that,” she mentioned.
She described watching those figures come out as one of the worst parts of the whole experience. She mentioned: “You see all these people that put in their money that they bust their a*s at work to make, and then they put their money into this and they just lose it like for nothing after they trusted me. It’s a terrible feeling.”
The fallout was severe. She said the threats that followed the collapse were worse than anything she experienced after the original viral video.
Welch mentioned: “This time I was starting to get dea th threats and everything else. People telling me I owe them all this money and I’m like, I didn’t do this, and I’m sitting here and I’m the one getting hit for this.”
Two FBI agents showed up at her grandmother’s house looking for her while she was out of town. She said she was fully cooperative with both the FBI and the SEC, sending her phone in for four days of review.
She mentioned: “I gave them everything on my phone. Anything including keywords like memecoin, crypto, anything like that, they have every bit of it off my phone.” She was subsequently cleared by the SEC.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it. Besides, if they would have looked at mine and my brother’s messages, I was like, yeah, forget that crypto thing. Besides that, there’s nothing in there about crypto,” she stated.
Welch acknowledged one part of the responsibility she does carry. She mentioned: “I had no business putting my name on something I didn’t understand, which I know that now.” She also noted that the clearance by the SEC received little public attention and that the online backlash has continued regardless.
Welch is still named in a class action lawsuit alongside the primary figures identified in that filing, Los Angeles-based cryptocurrency trader Alex Larson Schultz, known online as Doc Holiday, and Hong Kong-based software engineer Clinton So, who developed the trading platform that launched the coin. Welch said she is not concerned about the outcome. “You can go through my phone. You can have it right now. There’s nothing in my phone.”
Asked what advice she would offer to another young person in her position who gets approached by someone in the crypto space, her answer was short. “Run as fast as you can, and don’t sign anything that you don’t understand or you don’t know how it works,” she mentioned.
