Girls Just Wanna Have Funds: Female Crypto Criminals Make News

When you think of a hardened crypto criminal, you might imagine a hooded young man hunched over a laptop.

But recent headlines prove that the digital assets space is an equal opportunities employer of sorts — with no shortage of women falling afoul of the law.

Some may have fallen into illicit activities accidentally, while there's little doubt others very much knew what they were doing.

Take Haliey Welch as an example. She's best known for becoming an overnight celebrity after drunkenly uttering the phrase "hawk tuah" into a microphone.

Not content with rolling out her own range of merchandise and a podcast, Welch has now reached the pinnacle of the attention economy by unveiling a memecoin.

HAWK's launch was nothing short of a disaster, with its market cap pumping and dumping faster than you can say "15 minutes of fame."

Community Notes warning investors have been slapped on several of Welch's X posts about the doomed project.

And a live Spaces stream as she tried to mitigate the damage was so inflammatory that the recording was hastily deleted.

It didn't help that Coffeezilla — a YouTuber renowned for investigating crypto scams — took to the stage and denounced HAWK for having "the worst tokenomics he's ever seen."

While Welch had posted enthusiastically about crypto, and attended a few conferences, it seems unlikely that a 22-year-old suddenly catapulted into the spotlight would, or could, mastermind such a scheme.

In fact, on the Spaces, it was a platform called overHere — and an account named Doc Hollywood — that ended up doing most of the talking.

"Hawk Tuah girl," once a prolific poster to 2.6 million followers on Instagram and 422,000 on X, has now gone quiet amid a barrage of negative news headlines.

And even if her role in the execution of this meme-coin was pretty limited, she could end up bearing many of the consequences.

Agencies like the SEC have been known to sit up and take notice when incidents like this have happened in the past, but the arrival of a more relaxed regulatory landscape under Donald Trump may mean action isn't taken here.

But that wouldn't stop Welch from being named in a class action lodged by aggrieved investors, with one firm already urging those whose fingers were burned by HAWK to get in touch.

The scandal engulfing Welch, which could irreparably damage the goodwill shown to her by online fans, is the latest in a long line of controversies.

Also this week, a woman was unmasked as the leader of a multibillion-dollar Russian money laundering network relied on by hackers and criminal gangs, amid allegations Tether was widely used in its operations.

Ekaterina Zhdanova has been sanctioned by the U.S. and is accused of funnelling funds for oligarchs — as well as handling crypto stolen from ransomware.

And last month, Heather Morgan — an amateur rapper also known as "Razzlekhan" and "The Crocodile of Wall Street" — was sentenced to 18 months behind bars for helping launder more than 120,000 BTC stolen from Bitfinex.

The stories of female criminals in this industry has long attracted intrigue, with the disappearance of OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova, often referred to as "Cryptoqueen," being turned into a hit podcast.

Girls just wanna have funds.