Hunter Biden is the latest personality to promote a cryptocurrency meme coin accused of being a scam.
The former president’s son launched the “LAPTOP” coin on Wednesday. The full diluted valuation of the coin quickly surged to $144 billion before crashing almost immediately, losing about 98.8% of its value in just a few short hours.
‘They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.’
The 56-year-old had promoted the coin Monday with a video compilation of news clips reporting the infamous laptop that he had left at a computer repair shop and was later obtained by the media and federal agents.
“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” wrote Biden in a post Tuesday.
“They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.”
But the massive increase and crash seemed to have all the earmarks of a classic “pump and dump” scheme, where the coin creators and insiders sell their shares near the maximum valuation, which leads to many investors losing nearly everything.
The coin creators often make outsized promises to the promoter but leave them holding the bag after “rug pulling” the common investors of their money.
President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump mocked Biden after reports of it crashing.
“Hunter should go back to painting,” he posted on social media.
Economic expert and Blaze News contributor Carol Roth responded in comments to Blaze News.
“Hunter Biden knows how to make something out of nothing — at least for himself. Now that his previously lucrative board memberships and painting careers aren’t quite as robust, it’s unsurprising he would support a meme coin scheme,” she said.
She also criticized meme coins as investments.
“Crypto generally, and meme coins in particular, are a part of growing trend of get-rich-quick and betting-oriented activities that seem to be pervasive in America these days,” Roth added. “If the value of something comes down to purely in selling it to the next guy trying to make a quick buck, it’s not really an investment — it’s a gambling vehicle.”
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Both President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have launched their own meme coins, which similarly climbed in value before collapsing.
“Why something that has been so misused by grifters? I understand the cynicism,” Hunter Biden wrote in the Tuesday post before the launch. “Trump has broken trust in everything he’s ever touched. And his token was no exception.”
Biden has since denied the allegations that he was taken in by a crypto-scheme. In a video posted to his account Friday, he claimed that there had been a mix-up but that he was “intimately” involved in the coin’s creation and that it still had a future.
One analysis found that an account apparently purchased $250,000 worth of Hunter’s meme coin, waited eight minutes while it skyrocketed in value, then dumped the coin for a profit of nearly $1 million.
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