NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) — Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible token collection and a host of its celebrity supporters are facing a class action lawsuit alleging they made false or misleading statements while promoting the NFT.
The list of defendants in the initial complaint includes veteran talent executive Guy Oseary, who the suit claims was part of a scheme to “leverage their vast network of A-list musicians, athletes, and celebrity clients and associates to misleadingly promote and sell the Yuga Financial Products.”
Also named as defendants in the proposed class action suit are Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus Jr., Post Malone, Madonna, Gwynith Paltrow, DJ Khalid, Serena Williams, Stephen Curry II, James Fallon, Justin Bieber, and Paris Hilton, among others.
“Defendants’ promotional campaign was wildly successful, generating billions of dollars in sales and re-sales,” the lawsuit alleges. “The manufactured celebrity endorsements and misleading promotions regarding the launch of an entire BAYC ecosystem (the so-called Otherside metaverse) were able to artificially increase the interest in and price of the BAYC NFTs during the Relevant Period, causing investors to purchase these losing investments at drastically inflated prices.”
In a statement provided to Fox News, Yuga Labs said: “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit and look forward to proving as much.”
The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs were a hot ticket at the beginning of the year with high profile celebrities such as Justin Bieber spending a reported $1.3 million worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum to acquire one of the tokens. Since then, prices for the token have fallen precipitously this year and in November, Bieber’s NFT was worth just $74,000 according to Yahoo Finance.
