Social media is a funny place sometimes.

As someone who is on social media a good bit for work, to stay informed and for just pure entertainment purposes, I understand the importance in remembering this important unwritten rule: Don’t believe everything you see or read on the internet.

Seems like an easy rule to remember, right? Well sometimes, common sense isn’t so common. Allow me to share with you the funniest, yet most disappointing I saw while scrolling on social media this weekend.

Upon returning home from work on Friday, I saw that a good number of people were allegedly scammed after investing money into a cryptocurrency called $HAWK. This coin was created by Haliey Welch, the creator of the famous/infamous “Hawk Tuah” meme. If you want to know what exactly that means… then Google it.

Welch got famous by one viral interview and has taken the internet by storm. She has a successful social media brand, a top 5 charting podcast in the world (!!) and has become a multi-millionaire in a short number of months. But any goodwill she had with the casuals of the world may have just disappeared after this latest stunt.

Welch and her team decided to get into the world of cryptocurrency by launching a “meme coin.” Because, reasons?

It was described as a way for Welch’s “fans” to interact with her and to be a part of a community. All heartwarming stuff, right? 

There’s just one problem, though. It was doomed to fail from the start, and it was intentional.

Around 20-30 minutes after launch, the coin’s value plummeted after several accounts sold their coin for large profits. As of this writing, the coin’s current value is close to $0. The total market value decline was 91 percent from the time of launch. Yikes.

So what went wrong for this $HAWK coin?

According to a cryptocurrency tracking tool called Bubblemaps, approximately 96-97 percent of wallets intertwined with the $HAWK coin were that of one cluster. What this means is that 96-97 percent of this cluster was interconnected somehow, and that 3 percent of the pool was available to the public for trading.

Now I’m no financial expert like Austin Harris, but you’d have to be a fool to consider buying in with those numbers.

To make matters worse, those who wished to buy into this coin before launch were forced to pay 15 percent in fees. It is estimated that around $1.7 million in fees were collected. 

Where did those fees go exactly? Well no one really knows.

Now I say all of this with the caveat that I am no cryptocurrency expert at all. In fact, I have never bought crypto outside of maybe $20-$30 in Bitcoin that I probably got my money back in a year or so later (this was before Bitcoin’s most recent spike). 

To me, I think it’s hilarious that people would even buy into something like this in the first place. While I know better than to not buy any “meme coin’s,” I assuredly thought others would, too. That’s what I get for thinking.

In a sense it’s also quite disappointing considering there is that golden rule of the internet I mentioned earlier. But even that, there’s some other sound advice that can be taken from this scheme and that is there is no such thing as “fast money.” Especially not from a “Hawk Tuah” coin.

Just remember these things when you’re on the internet, folks.

Evan Newton is the Managing Editor of The Covington News. He can be reached at enewton@covnews.com.