The FaZe Clan, an organization that only a few days ago had earned the cover of Sports Illustrated, said they had dismissed Frazier “Kay” Khattri while his brother, Jarvis “Jarvis” Khattri, and fellow scandal Nikan “Nikan” Nadim and Jakob ” Teeqo “were suspended after discovering a cryptocurrency scam.
“FaZe Clan has absolutely no involvement with our members’ activity with cryptocurrencies and we strongly condemn their behavior,” reads the brief statement. The allegations centered on a “Save The Kids” cryptocurrency that FaZe Clan members were promoting, for charity.
The four (Jarvis, among other things, some time ago was banned from Fortnite for using aimbot) are accused of practicing the so-called “pump & dump” or buying the cryptocurrency at a bargain price, promoting it and then selling it shortly before. that the speculative bubble burst. All this, according to the work of the detective-youtuber Coffezilla who brought it to light, was also promoted and disseminated on the Web by the same influencers through bogus accounts and other methods that were gradually hidden to erase the traces.
In essence, this would have been done by the members of the FaZe Clan mentioned, that is, they would have appeared in a video whose goal was to promote the noble intent of the Save the Kids token. Influencers RiceGum and Sommer Ray are also rumored to be involved in the affaire. Together, they boast over 69 million followers and even if some of them have bought the cryptocurrency, the income of the influencers is dizzying.
The virtual currency, as we said, is based on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) or a kind of “charity token” that should have had the aim of “redistributing the money” both to the holders of the token and to the charities to which it was tied up.
Detective Coffeezilla allegedly demonstrated how FaZe Kay, Jarvis and Nikan all bought the token in “presale”, that is, well before the coin was made available to the public (June 12), selling the same coin for a higher price shortly after. arrival on the digital market.
FaZe Kay made public amends on Twitter last week – saying that sadly not knowing the cryptocurrency world he may have been wrong, but in good faith – but that wasn’t enough to save his face and career.
Yet another scandal, which involves an organization that has already been a repeat offender in this sense (do you remember the CEO of FaZe who said he made a lot of money with “skin betting” in a tax haven?) eternal debate: rules and limits are needed, especially for a potentially devastating combination such as that of cryptocurrencies and influencers.
In this case, the mere fact that influencers masked their actions as a charity initiative makes what happened even more surreal.
In the Coffeezilla tweet you can see all the evidence collected and the intense monitoring that the same has done in the past weeks.