Cristiano Ronaldo is being demanded $1 billion for advertising crypto products
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One of the best football players in history, Cristiano Ronaldo, may be forced to pay a significant amount of money in a lawsuit filed against him in Florida by a group of investors. The plaintiffs accuse the Portuguese of misleading them by advertising products related to the Binance crypto exchange. The claimants estimate the damage caused at $1 billion. This is not the first time that unlucky investors are trying to compensate for their losses by filing lawsuits against celebrities who advertised various crypto products.
A group of investors filed a lawsuit in a Florida court demanding to recover $1 billion from the famous Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo. The statement, submitted to the court on November 27, notes that investors suffered losses by being influenced by an advertising campaign featuring the football player and investing in tools promoted by a crypto exchange Binance. The lawsuit alleges that Cristiano Ronaldo promoted and actively participated in the offering of unregistered securities in cooperation with Binance. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) refers to “unregistered” securities as those that are not registered with it. They are subject to some restrictions. In particular, only qualified investors can be their buyers. These include persons whose net assets exceed $1 million or have an annual income of more than $200 thousand.
The plaintiffs believe that Cristiano Ronaldo should have known that Binance was trading in unregistered securities, since he has extensive investment experience and also has the opportunity to hire qualified advisors. Cristiano Ronaldo was also accused of failing to report to the SEC the amount of remuneration or income received from Binance.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Binance have been collaborating since November last year. Then Binance began selling a collection of NFT tokens (digital works of art created using blockchain technology) related to the football player.
They are some kind of virtual figurines. At the start of sales, the minimum price of one token was $77 (about 6.6 thousand tokens were offered for sale that day). But by the end of the trading session it dropped to $2.3 and never rose higher. At the moment, the token costs just over $1. In total, more than 1.5 million tokens are circulating on the market. Their current value is around $1.6 million, roughly equivalent to two days’ worth of Cristiano Ronaldo’s income (according to estimates Forbesin 2023 the Portuguese will earn $260 million, of which $200 million is under a contract with the Saudi club An-Nasr).
However, the plaintiffs are not focusing on these tokens that turned out to be useless, but on the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo’s involvement in the promotion of Binance increased the number of online requests for products offered by the crypto exchange by 500%. This was allegedly a direct consequence of the football player’s extreme popularity (he has 850 million subscribers on social networks alone) and involved an indefinite number of people in an obviously unprofitable scheme.
The lawsuit against the forwarder was filed just five days after Binance agreed to pay a large fine for irregularities. Binance was accused of non-compliance with various sanctions imposed by the US authorities and money laundering.
Under the terms of the settlement with regulators, Binance will pay a fine of $4.3 billion.
The founder and head of the company, Changpeng Zhao, resigned and will personally pay a $50 million fine. The court will announce the verdict in his case in February next year. He faces up to ten years in prison, although, most likely, the punishment will be much more lenient.
Cristiano Ronaldo is not the first celebrity to face criticism for promoting crypto products. Lawsuits similar to the current one have been filed against American football star Tom Brady, his ex-wife supermodel Gisele Bündchen, legendary boxer Floyd Mayweather, and just celebrity Kim Kardashian. Brady and Bündchen promoted products from the collapsed crypto exchange FTX. Kardashian and Mayweather promoted the EthereumMax cryptocurrency. This supposedly boosted its stock price, allowing Kardashian and Mayweather to sell the assets they were given as payment for their services at a good price before they dropped too much in price. There is no decision yet on the FTX-related lawsuit, but the EthereumMax plaintiffs have lost. The judge ruled that investors must make their own informed decisions when investing. However, the stars failed to fight off the SEC – many of them have already paid large fines for not disclosing the amounts received from crypto exchanges.
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