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Sports bettor and podcaster Jeff Nadu on Twitter asked Monday: "Whatever happened to the 'extortion' story that Taylor Mathis made up to pretend she wasn't involved in a pump and dump scam?"
Let's flash back in time to late last month.
Mathis, a DraftKings influencer known affectionately as "The Walking Bets Girl", found herself embroiled in a cryptocurrency scandal whereby she promoted a useless $Taylor token based off her likeness. Her promotion resulted in a $6 million market cap that reportedly earned Mathis a cool $120,000.
From Awful Announcing:
Mathis sold her stake for 95 SOL (another cryptocurrency, with 95 tokens currently worth just over $16,000). She then sent messages saying she didn’t want to be involved in $TAYLOR any more. She posted on X that crypto wasn’t for her and that she would donate the money to charity. But her account then bought 34 million $TAYLOR tokens at a new low price of $9,000 (giving her almost 1.5 times her initial stake and a $7,000 profit), and she promoted that she was back in on the coin. That led to yet more people questioning if she was illegally manipulating the market, and to them tagging DraftKings, and to her locking down her account and removing DraftKings references from it.
Mathis appeared in a video shortly thereafter claiming she was not really involved, mentioned some type of threats and contemplated suicide.
She revealed: "I only reluctantly even 'played along' because they hacked my iCloud and threatened me and my family posting our home addresses sending videos with guns etc if I didn’t do things."
Taylor appeared to be in total despair by late Friday.
"I honestly have never been in such a dark place in my life, I honestly want to kill myself. I have made no oney (sic) off of this and all the false information out there is disgusting. I don't know how people do this to people."
Fast forward a few weeks and Taylor Mathis is back giving out picks: Quinton Johnston's Longest Reception Over 21.5 Yards Monday night. There are no indications DraftKings has abandoned her.... at least none that we can find.
Teacher Tay is back with a White Board Win!
— Taylor Mathis (@TMathSports) November 25, 2024
Ravens vs Chargers
Quinton Johnston: Longest Reception Over 21.5 Yards
Good luck class!! pic.twitter.com/uQvfaQJaaU
Influencers are going to influence we suppose.
Just last week, the BBC reported on how another famous YouTube influencer, Logan Paul, allegedly misled fans over various crypto investments.
The BBC has seen new evidence suggesting he promoted investments without revealing he had a financial interest in them.
The influence of Paul - whose YouTube channel has more than 23 million followers - appears to have caused prices in these investments to spike, leading to suggestions he could have profited from sales of any tokens he held.
Paul also currently faces a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over a failed crypto project called CryptoZoo.
The BBC has discovered that shortly before Paul tweeted about a particular crypto coin in 2021, an anonymous crypto wallet with close connections to his public wallet had traded in the coin.
That anonymous wallet went on to make a $120,000 (£92,000) profit.
Crypto wallets (which can be physical devices or an online service) hold users' keys to their accounts, and let people send, receive and spend crypto.
Our finding comes after Time Magazine reported similar activity involving a different cryptocurrency and another anonymous wallet.
For several months, Paul refused to talk to the BBC about our investigation.
Nadu's followers do not appear to be buying Mathis' explanation.
"I love how she returned like nothing ever happened. Nothing to see here, move along," one follower wrote.
Others speculated that she "scammed a bunch of people" and "hoped they would stop talking about it".
Most people have.
One person on Twitter (now X) even drew parallels to Mathis and the reason why civilizations collapse.
Hoe_Math tweeted out that the "basic reason that civilizations collapse is that we value wealth more than the fountain from which it flows.
"You can be the fountain or you can hoard water. The more who hoard, the more hoarding grows popular. Eventually, it all dries up."
Krattle then chimed in. "People want to get rich quick from gambling on fake internet coins instead of producing."
Hoe_Math responded: "People keep asking me to create a meme coin so I can lump it and sell. I feel like that would burn my whole audience just for a bag of silver."
To which Aoi replied: "Yp, wholeheartedly agree. Just look at what happened to Taylor Mathis. Reputation > $10K bag".
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