Ever since the collapse of cryptocurrencies last year, lawsuits have been flying.
But a series of class-action lawsuits are piling up in federal court in Miami targeting high-profile guarantors of crypto exchanges like FTX and Binance, all filed by the same group of South Florida lawyers.
The latest lawsuit names global soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo for allegedly promoting the “crowdsourcing of investments in unregistered securities” sold by Binance, the crypto exchange that was hit with a $4 billion fine last week after pleading guilty to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida this week and centers around Ronaldo’s role in a global marketing campaign launched in 2022 for a series of Binance NFTs — or non-fungible tokens, a form of blockchain-backed artwork. which were for a short time extremely popular.
A representative for Ronaldo did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Monday’s lawsuit against Ronaldo came alongside similar class-action lawsuits naming Major League Baseball, Formula One racing, Mercedes Benz and advertising giants Dentsu and Wasserman, which created much of FTX’s global advertising campaign.
Messages left with representatives of MLB, Formula 1, Mercedes Benz, Dentsu and Wasserman were not immediately returned.
The lawsuits are the latest in a series of similar class-action lawsuits launched last year against high-profile guarantors of failed crypto exchanges such as Voyager and FTX, in which customers lost billions of dollars in deposits.
Over the past 18 months, a group of South Florida lawyers led by Adam Moskowitz have filed lawsuits on behalf of investors who lost money in last year’s crypto crash against paid celebrity guarantors, including Shaquille O’Neal, Mark Cuban, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Shohei Ohtani, Larry David, Steph Curry and Naomi Osaka.
“These celebrities have all been paid hundreds of millions of dollars taken directly from client deposits,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “Some of the world’s most famous and richest groups may now be held responsible for the dramatic $20 billion crypto collapse and the biggest financial scandals in US history.”
Moskowitz, joined in the lawsuits by lawyers from the firms Mark Migdal & Hayden and Boies Schiller and Flexner, led by renowned judge David Boies, is seeking at least $5 billion in damages from those who helped popularize crypto exchanges.
The cases from last year are ongoing, and each of the celebrities named is litigating.
Moskowitz, who specializes in class-action lawsuits, says cryptocurrency issues came to his attention more than two years ago, before the entire market crashed when he believed the special tokens each exchange minted, constitute an unregistered security.
He first sued Voyager early last year, before the stock market crashed and the Securities and Exchange Commission began filing lawsuits against many people in the industry, accusing them of trading in unregistered securities.
“That’s when what we were doing started to gain traction,” he said.
A series of favorable court decisions allowed his cases to gain momentum, he said, and allowed him to take a leading role in such actions.
In another class action filed earlier this year, Moskowitz and his partners sued a group of YouTube financial influencers for their role in promoting FTX, accusing them of taking money to uncritically praise the stock market.
Moskowitz said several of those cases have been settled, but others have continued.
